by David Walton
I knew they would have to keep the spores in some kind of high-level biocontainment to avoid them getting out and infecting the wrong people. I also knew they would be well guarded. I needed to figure out where that might be, and how to get inside. But, first, I had to call my brother.
I couldn’t go back out the front door—Andrew and Shaunessy would still be there. I found another exit, but if it worked anything like the NSA buildings, the door would set off an alarm if you didn’t use a valid badge at the badge reader. I decided it was worth the risk. At Fort Meade, the things went off from time to time when people forgot to use their badges before hitting the crash bar. Besides, they’d be worried about somebody getting in, not somebody getting out. I pushed my way through. As I suspected, a high-pitched alarm sounded. I ignored it and turned left along the side of the building, away from the main entrance.
Several blocks away, I stopped. No one had seen me, as far as I could tell. I took out my phone and called a number my brother had given me before I left Brazil.
He answered after one ring. “Neil? Is that you?”
“Hi, Paul,” I said.
“Everything okay?” His voice sounded as clear as if he were standing next to me.
“How do you get such good reception in the middle of a rainforest?” I asked.
“I’m not in Brazil anymore. I’m in Mexico. Heading your direction, with a lot of other people.”
“Keep them dispersed,” I said. “Their spore stockpile is limited, so they’re looking for concentrations of people they can hit all at once.”
“Good to know,” he said. “We’ll do what we can to mitigate that. But Neil?”
“Yeah?”
“One of ours who works at Global Strike Command gave us some intelligence on the plane they’re going to use to make the drop. You’re the best asset in place to act on it. Are you free to move around?”
“For the moment. What’s the intel?” I already missed the direct connection through the fungal network that would have allowed me to know everything he knew without having to speak at all. I felt disconnected from the rest of the Ligados family.
Paul whistled rapidly, the tones leaping about in rapid succession. It was a form of communication derived from the Johurá whistle language, but advanced far beyond it in the content it could communicate. It was not a language anymore, not in the sense of symbolic words. It was more like data transferred as thought from one mind to another.
“I understand,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“We’re counting on you, little brother.”
The bright sun baked me as I walked, though overall the temperature wasn’t as hot as I expected from a desert climate. The ground was flat and bare, except for the blue-gray mountains rising up out of the desert behind me. I could see the hangar long before I reached it, one of a trio of giant double cantilever monstrosities standing together on an ocean of tarmac.
I circled it, trying to look like I belonged there, and ignoring signs warning me that it was unlawful to enter the area without the permission of the base commander. I found an unmarked metal door at the side of the hangar, which, as Paul’s intel had promised, was unlocked. I opened it and slipped inside, squinting in the relative darkness.
Behind a bulky piece of machinery, under a tarpaulin, I found a pistol. It was small and compact, but I didn’t know guns well enough to recognize its type. My dad had a pistol, which I had fired at a range on several occasions as a teenager, but I was hardly a marksman. I slipped the pistol into the back waistband of my pants, like I had seen people do on TV.
I made my way past hanging parachutes and rolling maintenance ladders and stepped out into a cavernous space with a gently curving ceiling high above me. Dominating the space was the biggest airplane I had ever seen. Its wings stretched for what seemed like a mile in either direction from the rounded hump of its cockpit, without a sharp angle visible anywhere. Its stealth-black finish sucked away the light, and its long, curving shape suggested lethal precision. I recognized it as a B-2 Spirit, one of only twenty still in service, though I never imagined how intimidating it would look in real life. I knew it had the range to fly from here to São Paulo, drop its bombs, and fly back again.
This was the plane tasked with dropping McCarrick’s spores on the Ligados army. A bomber this powerful seemed like overkill for the mission, but, then again, if they were expecting significant antiaircraft defenses, the B-2 could hit them before they knew it was coming.
My job was to take it down.
I knew from the information Paul had communicated that there was a place in the body of the plane, near the refueling station, where I could hide and not be detected until takeoff. Once we were aloft, I was to come out of hiding with my gun and shoot both pilots in the back of the head. After that, I wouldn’t be able to keep the plane from crashing, since I hadn’t the first clue how to fly a Piper Cub, never mind a billion-dollar military aircraft. It was a suicide mission.
I didn’t mind. I thought I should mind, that it should bother me very much, but I was unable to summon the emotion. I was only one part of the glorious whole of what humanity was becoming with the help of Aspergillus ligados. I might die, but the future we were building would live on. I ignored the part of me deep inside that was quietly screaming.
I had no time to waste. Before long, someone else would come into the hangar and catch me lurking around. I walked across the hangar toward the plane.
“Neil!”
I spun, surprised to hear my name. I was even more surprised to see Shaunessy Brennan walking toward me.
“Neil, what are you doing?”
My mind raced, putting the pieces together. She had followed me. She must have seen me leave the Sandia lab and trailed me all the way here. She could report me, and my mission would fail. The spores would drop, and countless Ligados would become slaves to General Barron or whoever controlled the command signal.
I yanked the pistol out of my waistband and pointed it at her. Despite the fact that I hadn’t fired one in years, I felt confident that I could hit her. That I could put a bullet in any square inch of her I chose, in fact. I was acutely aware of every part of my body, the angle of my arm, the positions of my fingers, and I could mentally project the parabolic arc of the bullet from the weapon to its precise destination. I wouldn’t miss.
She took a step back, her eyes wide, and threw her hands in the air. “Neil? You don’t have to do this.”
My finger touched the trigger. I felt its cool, metal surface, the give of its underlying mechanism. I had to kill her. She would talk. She would ruin everything.
“I saw what you wrote on the plane,” she said. “I know you’re in there. Fight it, Neil. This isn’t you.”
I had no choice. If I let her live, there was no way I could hide on the plane and not be found. Whatever security hole had been created by other Ligados, allowing me this chance to slip aboard, would not be repeated.
But this was Shaunessy. The part of me that was still myself rebelled. My finger tried to squeeze the trigger, but I resisted, refusing to allow it to finish the job. The muscles of my hand strained, shaking, alternately squeezing and releasing the trigger by millimeters. Sweat broke out on my forehead.
I looked Shaunessy in the eye. “Help,” I said. “Please help me.”
Then I pulled the trigger. At the same moment, I desperately shifted my weight, trying to throw off my aim, but it wasn’t enough. She went down, a shocked expression on her face, her hands reaching for the hole the bullet had torn into her chest. I stood there, horrified. I had killed her.
For a moment, the hold the fungus had on my mind cleared, and I felt the full awfulness of what I had just done. I realized I had no hope of resisting it, not for long, not if it could make me do something like this. There was only one way out, if I had the quickness and courage to go through with it. I raised the gun to my head.
I reached for the trigger, but before I could pull it I felt a sudden pain in t
he middle of my back. My body stiffened, all my muscles going totally rigid as an arc of pain shot through my body, and I collapsed to the floor. The gun dropped from my suddenly nerveless fingers. A member of Kirtland’s security police force stood over me, Taser in hand, surrounded by three of his squadmates. These weren’t civilian police or rent-a-cop security guards. They were soldiers, with hard expressions, black riot gear, and assault rifles as long as my arm. I wished they’d shot me. I wondered why they hadn’t.
They hauled me to my feet. I could barely stand, but I didn’t need to, since they held me up. I could now see Shaunessy’s prone and motionless form, surrounded by more soldiers and a medic. I didn’t understand. How had so many people gotten here so fast?
Melody Muniz strode around them and into view, her expression full of dismay, fury, and horror. “How did he get a gun?” she demanded. “He wasn’t supposed to have a gun.”
Then it all made sense. I had never been alone in the hangar. Shaunessy had seen what I had written on the plane and told Melody about it. Melody and others had kept track of me, probably listened in to my phone conversation with my brother, and then followed me here. The soldiers had probably been ordered to take me non-lethally, so I could tell them what I knew.
“Is she dead?” I asked.
Melody impaled me with her eyes. “Shaunessy begged to talk to you before we took you down. She wanted to reason with you, to give you a chance to change.”
I hated the way she was looking at me. I wanted to tell her I had tried to resist, but it just seemed like a weak excuse. The truth was, I hadn’t resisted. I had given in to the fungus, and Shaunessy had paid the cost. I didn’t deserve anyone’s pity.
“Please,” I said. “Is she dead?”
Melody paused and looked back. At that moment, Shaunessy sat up and looked around. Half of her blouse was wet with blood, but it had been cut away to reveal the bullet-proof vest she wore underneath. Her upper arm was neatly wrapped in a bandage that already showed a spot of red through the fabric. The shot, thrown off by my resistance, had missed the vest and clipped her in the arm.
“She’ll be all right,” Melody said. She turned back. “I don’t know about you.”
CHAPTER 32
They locked me in the base’s correctional facility, usually reserved for military personnel. They took everything in my pockets, including the iPhone, and put me in a tiny room with a plastic bed, a foam mattress, a toilet, and nothing else. I could hear other inmates drilling and responding to shouted commands like it was boot camp, but I was in isolation, and they left me alone.
I had a lot of time to think.
I had hurt someone I cared about. I knew now that Shaunessy would live, but when I’d shot her, I had no way of knowing she was wearing a vest. I had actually tried to kill her. I looked at my hands as if they belonged to someone else. I had betrayed my coworkers, betrayed my country, betrayed the NSA. Worse, I barely cared. I felt more emotion over failing at my mission than I did over betraying my friends.
Of course, I had also been betrayed. First by Paul, then by both of my parents. Instead of unifying us, the fungus was dividing us. We couldn’t trust anybody. Not even ourselves.
I didn’t really blame my mom or dad or Paul for what they’d done to me. They were under the compulsion of the fungus. It wasn’t their choice. On the other hand, I felt entirely responsible for shooting Shaunessy. I remembered doing it. I had stood there, gun in hand, and I had pulled the trigger. I had resisted for a time, so clearly I had the power to fight it. But I wasn’t strong enough. I had given in, and it was Shaunessy who had suffered for my weakness.
I sat on the concrete floor, my back against the wall, and buried my head in my hands. I couldn’t trust my own mind. Which emotions were mine, and which were from the fungus? Even when I could tell, that knowledge didn’t help me change them. I couldn’t even feel horrified about the thought of a fungus living in my brain. I knew, inside, that it was horrible, and that formerly I would have found it horrible, but when I thought about it, all I felt was a flood of warm and satisfied feelings.
Thinking about McCarrick’s version of the fungus, however, prompted no such positive reaction. It was a competing species to the fungus inhabiting me, trying to coopt the same available resources. In this, the two parts of my mind agreed. I could actually think clearly about it, without unwanted emotions clouding my perceptions.
But how did it know? How could a fungus think through an issue and come to a conclusion? The answer, once I considered it, was obvious: it couldn’t. The fungus itself didn’t think at all. It improved my brain’s efficiency and affected its workings, but ultimately it was the same as the mycelium in the NSA basement, wrapped around the fiber-optic cable—a complex data filter, able to evaluate feedback and respond. It was me doing the thinking. The fungus was just integrating with my brain like it would integrate with and make use of anything else.
If I thought something was against the fungus’s interests, it flooded my brain with chemicals paralyzing my ability to say or do it. If I thought something would benefit it, it prompted me to act. The same thing must happen on a larger scale with a group of connected humans, where the consensus opinion mattered. Here, however, I was the only one judging what the result would be. Since I thought McCarrick’s strain of the fungus would be harmful, perhaps fatal, to the original organism, it encouraged my thoughts that it had to be destroyed.
And it was only a matter of time before they dosed me with McCarrick’s spores. I knew it was coming. I would be just like all those other captured Ligados—slaves to General Barron’s every command. It was utterly terrifying. Having my consciousness altered by another species was bad enough, but the idea of another human being having that kind of power over me was the worst sort of violation I could imagine.
Which meant that I was now thoroughly a traitor to my country. Even thinking clearly, I opposed the choices of my own government. I didn’t want Aspergillus ligados in my head, but I didn’t want General Barron in my head even more. I didn’t want that B-2 to take off and fulfill its mission. I had no illusions that turning people into mind slaves would stop once the war had been won. If that cat got out of the bag, so to speak, there would be no stuffing it back in again.
For me, McCarrick’s spores would mean living as a puppet, perhaps for the rest of my life. For Aspergillus ligados, however, it could mean extinction, a complete replacement by a hardier species. Taking control of humans might turn out to have been a disastrous strategy after all. It would have been better off sticking to the rainforest.
The thought made me sit up straight, suddenly alert. It wasn’t uncommon for an evolutionary step that initially helped a species to ultimately lead to its extinction. Specialization to a specific kind of food, for instance, might lead to mass starvation when that food became unavailable. Modifications that increase offspring survival rates might lead to overpopulation and the extinction of a prey species on which the population depends. Survival of the fittest was greedy and shortsighted.
This expansion into human symbiosis might be just such a step for the fungus—initially advantageous but ultimately catastrophic. We might help it to spread around the world, but we might also create a rival that would ultimately eradicate it. If so, then having the fungus in my mind was actually detrimental to the organism as a whole. Extricating it from my mind—and from all other human minds—would be in the fungus’s best interest. Humans were toxic to its survival. Most people just didn’t know it yet.
I found that as long as I thought in that way, using my intelligence to consider what would benefit the fungus, it didn’t fight me. I felt no overwhelming emotional response that buried my thought processes. We were working together, using my mind to determine a strategy to improve the fungus’s chances of survival.
Could we actually get it to extract itself from our minds for its own future good? I wasn’t sure. But one thing was certain: if it meant destroying McCarrick’s spores, then the fungus and I
were on the same team, at least for a little while.
I rattled the door of my cell until my guard—a big blond with senior airman’s stripes—opened a slim window slat. His flat stare made me think he’d been on correctional guard duty for a long time.
“I need to see Melody Muniz,” I said. “Please, tell her I have information on the Ligados attack that I’m willing to share.”
“No visitors allowed,” the senior airman said. “Orders from General Barron.” He slammed the window shut.
“I can help us win!” I shouted. “I just want to tell someone what I know!”
He slid the window open again.
“Please, can you just tell Melody Muniz I was asking for her? Just that. Tell her I have information.”
“Let’s get this clear,” he said. “I’m not your messenger, and I’m not your maid. I can, however, make your life a living hell if you don’t shut your hole right now. Are we clear?”
“It could mean the war,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “She can ignore me if she wants. The general can forbid her to see me. Just, please, don’t let thousands of people die for lack of information.”
He stared at me, his facial expression not changing remotely, and then shut the window again. It was the best I could do. I lay down on the bed and wondered how long it would be before they dosed me with McCarrick’s spores, and how many of the people I loved would survive the week.
When the door finally opened, it was Shaunessy, not Melody, who came into my cell. I pulled myself up to a sitting position. She brought a small stool with her and sat. One of her sleeves had been cut away to make room for a thick bandage around her arm.