The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  “Whew,” Shaunessy said. “Another first.”

  “You’ve never been in his office before?”

  “I’ve never even been on this floor.”

  We regrouped back in our room. “This is serious stuff,” Melody said. “The government of Colombia is asking where the United States will stand if Venezuela invades them. FARC demonstrations have tripled around the country, and several major highways have been shut down with landmines. FARC is apparently seeing this as their chance to seize control.”

  “What are their chances, realistically?” I asked. “The Colombian military hasn’t been able to shut them down, but the government still has the far superior force, right?”

  “You’ll have to ask the CIA for the over-under on that one,” Melody said. “Our job is to figure out who’s pulling the strings and what their end game is. That was an incredibly coordinated attack. From now on, the term Ligados is our official umbrella name for these people, whoever they turn out to be. My money says the messages in Johurá we’ve been cracking are directly related. But there are an awful lot of questions we can’t answer.”

  “How were the assassinations accomplished?” Shaunessy asked. “Do we know?”

  “The investigation is ongoing by the national police in both countries, but in both cases, it looks like top, trusted staffers strapped bombs underneath their clothing and suicided. Complicit security personnel who enabled them to avoid electronic detection have since disappeared. The plots were carefully planned and remarkably similar. The real mystery is how the Ligados managed to compromise high-ranking, carefully vetted people in both governments. It’s not like they haven’t dealt with threats like this before.”

  We worked late into the night again. Around eight o’clock, team members started to leave, and by ten Melody and I were once again the only people left in the room. She stopped by my desk and dropped a clipped stack of paper next to my keyboard. For an organization with so many computers, the NSA sure killed a lot of trees, and Melody was one of the worst offenders. “Take a look when you get a chance,” she said. “It’s a media analysis one of the data mining teams put together.”

  I picked up the bundle and paged through it. It was a collection of news stories from multiple countries, mostly in Spanish or Portuguese, many of them from small city newspapers located in the Amazon basin. I picked one out at random.

  “Genius of the Amazon,” the title read in Portuguese. It went on to describe a Sateré-Mawé tribesman who had walked out of the jungle and showed genius-level aptitude in mathematics and, after learning Portuguese in a matter of days, tested with an IQ of 180. He appeared to be in his forties (he didn’t know his precise age) and had spent his life until then hunting in bare feet and growing guarana.

  The article was sensationalistic, and I doubted a number of its claims. I paged through the others, and found that they were similar, differing wildly in location and details but with the same basic concept: native with no formal education demonstrates astonishing intellect. Individually, they could be dismissed. As a group, they held some weight.

  “What’s the relevance to our assassinations?” I asked.

  Melody shrugged, a tired, barely noticeable movement. “Maybe none. But given our impossible Johurá code talkers, I’m inclined to keep it in mind.”

  I waved the stack of papers. “Has anyone mapped these?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You go ahead and get some sleep. I’ll map them, and we can talk about it in the morning.”

  She shook her head and sank into the seat next to me. “It’ll go twice as fast with two. I’ll sleep next year.”

  We used an in-house version of Google Earth, one that was hosted somewhere in the vast server farm that adjoined our basement room. The surface of the globe was covered not just with the imagery Google acquired from commercial satellites, but with classified imagery as well. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency kept it current, and anyone in the NSA could link their own time- and date-stamped intelligence to it as well. As a result, you could zoom in on any part of the world and find images and links to practically everything the NSA knew about what was going on in that part of the world.

  It wasn’t perfect. Some groups didn’t bother to link their data to it, while other groups inundated it with irrelevant or inaccurate information. On the whole, though, it was the coolest piece of software I had ever played with. The top-secret world at my fingertips.

  For the next hour, we tagged the stories in the packet to the locations on the globe where they had happened, along with the date and time, when it was available. If the nationality or origin of the indigenous person was known, then we tracked them back to the village they had come from. By the time we worked through the whole stack, a picture had emerged.

  On the globe, oriented to show the whole Amazon region, a pattern of dots and lines radiated outward. The earliest stories came from logging camps or other towns embedded in the rainforest. The natives who would later show dramatic signs of intelligence were, at that point, still living in their villages as members of the Ocaina, the Ticuna, the Culina, the Sharanahua, the Nukuini, the Poyanawa, and the Asheninca-Kampa. All of these were deep jungle tribes, far from civilization, near the border of Brazil and Peru.

  As time passed, members of those tribes started appearing in towns and cities, and the progression of the stories proceeded outward toward the outskirts of the Amazon. The first stories of the Ligados killings and abductions came after that, followed by increased guerrilla activity in Colombia and Peru and the Johurá communications between FARC, ELN, and Shining Path.

  “It’s spreading,” I said. “Moving outward from a central location.”

  That central location was hard to pin down with very much accuracy, but it seemed to be coming from the Maici River basin, home of the Johurá and one of the most unexplored and hard to reach territories in the world. The globe just turned green in those areas, thick jungle into which the cameras of satellites and drones could shed no light.

  It was midnight. I yawned, and Melody did, too. “Good work,” she said. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  We walked out together, my mind still spinning with the implications of the data. Something had apparently happened to drive all those indigenous people out of their villages and into towns and cities, where they displayed sudden and unexpected intellectual prowess. Had that genius been there all along, waiting for an opportunity to show itself? Or had something happened to alter them?

  We stepped through the metal detector and out into the parking lot. The night was cool and crisp, and stars spread across the sky. I spotted Venus just over the horizon to the west. Another line of lights stretching into the distance came from the planes queued up to land at Baltimore/Washington International.

  “How’s your granddaughter?” I asked.

  “She seems to be doing okay.” Melody shook her head. “I wish I had more time to talk with her. To tell her she doesn’t need drugs to succeed. Though she probably wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”

  “No lasting side effects from the overdose?”

  She shook her head. “In fact, she took her Advanced Placement exams this week. Six of them.”

  I drove home to my father’s house, thinking of Paul’s ordeal in the Amazon. The spot where his boat had been hijacked was nine hundred kilometers away from the Maici River valley, which fit with the timeline of the spread of intelligent-tribesman stories. An image popped into my head of Paul triumphantly laying down the letters for zugzwang on the Scrabble board, followed by all of the games he had won handily since he had come home from the hospital.

  Gravel crunched as I pulled into the driveway. My parents would both be asleep by now, so I was surprised to see a light coming from the first floor. Paul had long since moved back to his apartment near the University of Maryland, and I hadn’t seen him for a week.

  I swung the door open and closed it quietly behind me, then followed the dim lights toward the back porch.
Paul sat in a wicker chair with a laptop perched on his knees, typing rapidly. A table lamp shone dimly through a yellow shade, but the white glare of the screen on Paul’s face was the brightest thing in the room. I sank into an upholstered chair and watched him.

  “Working late, or playing chess online?”

  Paul startled, nearly dropping the laptop.

  I laughed. “Didn’t you see me come in?”

  “I was concentrating.” He continued to peer at the laptop and pecked at a few keys.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I wanted to visit Dad. Make sure he was doing okay. Mom says you’re never here anymore.”

  “I’ve been working pretty late. There’s a lot to do.”

  Paul didn’t answer, just kept typing.

  “How are you feeling, Paul?”

  He closed the laptop and studied me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “Breathing okay? Sleeping well? Experiencing anything odd?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Have you been taking your antifungals?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

  I made a frustrated noise. “You’re supposed to keep taking them. For three years, they said. The infection could come back.”

  “Do I seem sick to you?”

  “It’s not a matter of feeling sick. You don’t want to mess around with this stuff. If it comes back, it’ll be a lot harder to treat.”

  “I’m fine. Why the third degree?”

  “Well, there were all those fungal infection cases in Pará.”

  “You’ve known about that for weeks. There’s something else.” He studied me. “Something at work. You discovered something that made you concerned about me.”

  His perceptiveness gave me a chill. Was this just normal intuition? Or something else? “There have been news cases of indigenous people, uneducated people, doing brilliantly in math all of a sudden, or learning new languages in a week. A few of them are involved in some pretty bad stuff, willingly or not, I can’t tell. The people who attacked you are probably part of it.”

  “And you think, what? That I’m involved with . . . ah.” He smiled and nodded to himself. “The Scrabble games.”

  I felt some heat rise to my face. “Not to be arrogant or anything,” I said, “but I always used to crush you at that game.”

  “So you think that if I get the better of you at Scrabble, I must be involved in some international conspiracy?”

  I paused. “Paul? What are you working on in your lab?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Paul’s mycology lab operated as part of the University of Maryland, located inside the notoriously traffic-heavy Washington, DC, beltway. We took the train to the College Park station, which dropped us only a few minutes’ walk from his building.

  “You have to promise not to tell anyone what I show you,” he said, for what seemed like the tenth time.

  “I’ve got it,” I said. “I told you I wouldn’t, and I won’t. I don’t want to tell your secrets. I just want to know you’re okay.”

  He laughed, though it sounded a little forced to me. “I’m better than okay,” he said.

  The lab was in the Plant Sciences building, a newly built red-brick facility with white trim. I smirked at the “Plant Sciences” sign, remembering various times Paul had complained that Fungi was a kingdom in its own right, with over a hundred thousand distinct species, and deserved a building of its own.

  Paul let us in with his ID card, a security check that seemed ludicrously minimal now that I was accustomed to daily trips in and out of Fort Meade. The painted cinderblock halls echoed like my memories of high school. He unlocked a door labeled Chaverri Mycology Lab, and I followed him in.

  It was antiseptically neat. Microscopes stood aligned on the table with laser precision, at right angles to the computers, which were as white and clean as everything else in the lab. Rows of small plastic drawers decorated the counters, each meticulously labeled, behind Bunsen burners and Erlenmeyer flasks and other items I vaguely remembered from chemistry class. Under one counter was a large device I didn’t recognize that looked like a washing machine. On a central table sat rows of petri dishes, also labeled, but with less careful handwriting. I leaned over and peered at them, making out phrases like “Brain Heart Infusion Agar (BHIA), 5% sheep’s blood” and “Cornmeal Glucose Sucrose Yeast Extract Agar.”

  Paul grinned. “The sheep’s blood is for primary isolation and cultivation,” he said. “I move it to the cornmeal to encourage sporulation.”

  I peered at the dish. A white splotch in the center bloomed outward, like mold on a piece of bread. A pattern of what looked like millions of tiny filaments spread toward the edges of the dish, shifting in color from white to a greenish brown.

  “So this is it?”

  Paul nodded. “At the hospital, Dr. Chu said it was paracoccidioidomycosis. That would mean an infection with the Paracoccidioides brasiliensis fungus. And while this lovely specimen certainly shares some similarities, I can now state with confidence that that’s not what it is.”

  “No? What is it, then?”

  “Something new. Not that ‘new’ is all that unusual. You could send a five-year-old into the Amazon with a bucket, and he’d come back with a dozen unclassified species. But as far as fungal species thriving in human hosts, there’s nothing in the literature about this little guy.”

  I ran my eyes along the rows of petri dishes, all of which seemed to be versions of the same specimen cultivated in different agar solutions. Some of them had multiple dark-colored stains, while others seemed hardly to have grown at all.

  “It’s trimorphic,” he said, excitement evident in his voice. “Depending on the temperature and nature of its host, it can transition among three different forms: a single-celled yeast that buds to reproduce, or two different multicellular filamentous forms.”

  “Is that rare?”

  “No, not all that unusual, actually. There’s a common blood infection that’s trimorphic. Paracoccidioides brasiliensis is dimorphic, as are a number of other pathogenic species. The ability to transform morphologies is what makes them so hard to kill and so potentially life-threatening. I suspect this species could survive in just about any host, plant or animal.”

  “So . . . is this where you explain why you haven’t been taking your medication?”

  “Let me show you something else first.”

  He logged into one of the computers, which was fitted with a pair of large flat-screen monitors. After a few moments of poking through the filesystem, he brought up a collection of grainy black-and-white images that reminded me of prenatal sonograms.

  “These are my lungs two days after I came home from the hospital,” he said. I didn’t really know what I was looking at, but he pointed out the major features. “These wheel shapes are lesions in the lung wall. That’s the yeast form. Then it transitions to a filamentous morphology, sending out mycelia between the cells.”

  “Preventing you from breathing.”

  “Well, indirectly. My immune system attacks the fungus, causing all sorts of fluid buildup, and that prevents me from breathing.”

  “I’m not seeing how this makes not taking your medicine an attractive option.”

  “Patience.” He flipped to the next image. “This is my lungs two weeks later.”

  “No more wheels,” I said.

  “Right. The yeast form is gone. No more immune attacks, no more fluid.”

  “Because of the medicine?”

  He shrugged. “That probably sped the process along. But the other form, the filamentous morphology, is still there. Look.” He flipped to the next image, which showed the lung tissue at a closer magnification. “See all the mycelia?”

  “You mean all those little lines? That’s the fungus?”

  “It’s thriving. Insinuating itself into all the spaces between the cells, sometimes tapping them for nutrients.”

  “It’s a parasite, then. It’s livin
g inside you. Eating you.”

  Paul rolled his eyes. “You have more cells of gut bacteria inside you than you have cells of you. Don’t get queasy about a little foreign life.”

  “The bacteria is supposed to be there. It’s helpful. Necessary, even. This is an infection. Are you intentionally letting it grow inside you just to study it? Isn’t there some kind of, I don’t know, code of ethics that frowns on that sort of thing?”

  Paul leaned back and interlaced his fingers behind his head. “On the contrary. Self-experimentation has a long and storied history that has led to some important discoveries. Werner Forssmann won a Nobel Prize for threading the first cardiac catheter into his own heart. Barry Marshall earned a Nobel for proving—through self-experimentation—that Helicobacter pylori was the cause of gastric ulcers.”

  I gave him my best skeptical look. “And wasn’t there a guy who drank cholera?”

  “There was! Max von Pettenkofer. He wanted to prove his theory that cholera spread through the air, not through fluid contact. He was . . . um . . . wrong.”

  I let that hang in the air for a few moments without answering.

  “Let’s skip to the finale, then,” he said, and cycled through a series of images until he found the one he was looking for. The last image was a rotating, three-dimensional color map of something I couldn’t identify.

  “This is the frontal lobe of my cerebellum,” Paul said.

  “Wait. Your brain? How are you getting these images?”

  “It’s from a PET scan.”

  “Isn’t that expensive? When Dad gets one, they cost a thousand dollars a pop.”

  “A guy on the third floor is doing research on new tomography techniques. I told him I’d be a test subject in exchange for the results.”

  “Okay. And you found what? That the fungus is in your brain, too?”

  “Yup. But in a good way.”

  I stared at him, expecting him to break out laughing and gloat about how far he’d strung me along. He looked back at me, totally serious. Finally, I said, “How can fungus possibly be in your brain in a good way?”