The Nirvana Plague

by Gary Glass

  Marley said, “The trick is to know which explanation is the most probable.”

  “It’s the one that assumes the least spooky stuff—” Peters said.

  “—All right,” Benford said. “We’ll come back to this. First, let’s review what we think we do know.”

  She turned to Lieutenant Tyminski, sitting behind her. “Dave, do you have Dr. Lang’s epi graph? Put that up, please.”

  Tyminski’s hands flicked over his tablet. Seconds later the walls around them came to life and lit up with a graphic two meters wide.

  “This is Dr. Lang’s latest plot. Anything you’d like to point out, doctor?”

  Lang, like Mr. Wenslau sitting beside her, was from the CDC. They’d flown up from Atlanta especially for this assignment. Her expertise was infectious disease, of course. But she looked more like a librarian than an infectious disease fighter. Short cropped hair, light complexion, square face. In a skirt and blouse, she was, like Marley, out of uniform.

  Wenslau had the look of a wise crow: sharp, portly, dark, a little tattered round the edges. In the dossiers his area had been given as “logistics, command, and control.” He was the guy who knew what was possible and how to get it done.

  Lang sat up straighter. “Yes, well, let’s see,” she said in a singsong voice. “The trend line is a third order polynomial. As you can see—”

  She stopped. She was pointing at the wall display, and suddenly found herself aiming at a red spot.

  “Active track,” Benford said. “Feature of the leaf.”

  She pointed at the wall herself and a blue spot appeared and followed the aim of her finger. A little tag with Benford’s name on it followed the spot as it roamed over the wall.

  “How’s it know you’re pointing?” Lang said.

  “Virtual modeling algorithm,” Wenslau muttered.

  Lang smiled without humor. “NIH gets all the best toys.”

  Benford put them back on course: “You were saying? About the trendline?”

  Lang folded her finger in and resumed: “Yes, well, as you can see from the chart, the cases logged in the past few days have really swung that line upwards. Previous to this week, the case counts were so few and so irregular that it was questionable whether there was really any progressive trend there. I think it’s less questionable now.”

  Peters eyed the wall display critically. “But that assumes the chart actually measures something. There’s no diagnostic criteria. So there’s no way to know how accurate the counts on your chart are.”

  Benford turned on him impatiently: “Two minutes ago you objected we can’t discuss diagnostic criteria until we know there’s a disease to describe. Now you’re objecting that we can’t assume there’s a disease until we’ve described it.”

  “You tell me, colonel, how you decided what to count on this chart.”

  “We’re going by the seat of our pants. You’ve seen the tapes and read the reports too. Gut reaction is the best I’ve got at this point. That’s why I want to talk about diagnostic criteria. That’s why Dr. Marley is here. He’s got the nearest thing to a diagnostic instrument we have.”

  “I’m just saying that at best we don’t know what we’re charting, and at worst we’re charting an illusion. The counts on your chart just assume that Marley’s cases and the military cases are the same thing.”

  “That’s the presumptive theory we’re operating under.”

  “I think that’s a problem. The incidence rate on that chart is so low that the standard error of measurement is very high. If you throw out five cases, that changes the sample significantly. And if even one or two of the military cases are incorrect, it invalidates your trend even more.”

  “Actually,” Marley said, “there are probably more than five civilian cases.”

  Lang and Benford both said, “There are?”

  “Yes. I’ve received correspondence from doctors at two other psychiatric hospitals who saw my paper and think they may have some cases.”

  “What makes them think so?” Benford said.

  “Similar indications, of course.”

  Benford was clearly annoyed. “Where are they?”

  “One in Houston, one in San Francisco.”

  “Forward those messages to me, please.”

  It wasn’t a request.

  Lang raised her hand, like she wanted to be called on.

  “Disease outbreaks are often unmistakable,” she said, her lilting voice singing the opening notes of an instructional lecture. “Sixteen people spend the night vomiting after eating roast pork at the company picnic. That’s easy to spot. But often the outbreak is not so obvious. When we have a suspicion, we must assume the suspicion is well-founded and react accordingly. If we don’t, people are going to get sick that wouldn’t have if we had acted more aggressively.”

  It wasn’t clear to Marley whether this was meant for him or for Peters, but Peters took it as his.

  “I understand that, Dr. Lang,” he replied. “I just don’t buy that the cases Dr. Marley reported on have anything to do with the military cases. The similarity between them is dubious. And the similarity between the individual battlefield cases is probably due to the similarities of the affected subjects — age, training, environment, etc.”

  Benford flattened a hand on the table, signaling her turn to argue. “All right, Dr. Peters. Here’s the thing. These subjects don’t look like your typical battlefield stress reaction. They just don’t. I’ve met these men and women. There was just something different there. And that was Dr. Marley’s feeling about his patients. You’ve seen those tapes. So has Dr. Marley.”

  Peters waved her off stiffly. “Dr. Marley’s paper rightly calls IDD ‘pseudo-infectious’. For the simple reason that there was no credible biological vector. We’ve all seen how ideas catch on and become fads. Fifty years ago everybody was schizophrenic. It was the hottest thing going. Thirty years ago everybody was depressed, and doctors were handing out mood stabilizers like popsicles at a parade. After that everybody who was anybody was bipolar. And in the military, it’s even worse. Every little war has its own mysterious malady. Every soldier somehow knows the symptoms. Now I’m not saying these cases are malingerers. But you know, you’re up there on the line, you’re scared shitless all day every day, you’re sleep-deprived, hungry, exhausted, you feel like dog puke all the time. You know it’s not a normal way to feel, so you look for an explanation. Everybody you know knows somebody who came down with some weird non-specific brain disease and got pulled off the line. You feel kind of like that. You feel non-specifically weird! Maybe you have it! Our brains, the crowning glory of evolution by natural selection, were created by our bodies to keep our bodies alive — to recognize danger at a distance, both spatial and temporal, and avoid it if at all possible. It’s no surprise then that you wake up in your bunker one morning, or inside your tank, and you’re not yourself anymore. You’ve got it, whatever it is. But it doesn’t have to be an organic disease. It’s an idea disease.”

  Next to Marley, Delacourt shook her head doubtfully — her fine dark hair bobbed and flashed with light. “The infectious memes metaphor has been out of favor for decades, Dr. Peters,” she said. “I don’t know if it ever really was in favor. Cute idea, but in the final analysis, scientifically meaningless.”

  “I’m talking about fashions, fads, crazes. Memes or no memes, you do believe in the reality of fads, don’t you?”

  “I’ve talked with these people,” Benford said. “They’re not just playing a role.”

  “But, the thing is, you have got the idea too. You see what you expect to see. This is one of the central insights in the cognitive science field. We see what we expect to see. The brain actively filters awareness. We can’t help it. It’s how we’re wired. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Delacourt?”

  Delacourt nodded slightly and smiled. “Yes, Dr. Peters, I agree. But that doesn’t mean IDD isn’t real.”

  She gave a Marley a conspiratorial glance. Keep the faith.r />
  Minute by minute, Benford was losing the battle to conceal her impatience. “We’re here, Dr. Peters,” she said, “because we have good reason to believe that IDD is real.”

  Peters shook his head stubbornly. “We’re here because the boss didn’t like the other conclusion. But the secretary’s political instincts aren’t any measure of truth.”

  Sikora laughed again. “Well, there’s truth, and then there’s truth.”

  Peters continued the attack: “Look, the reason the politicians didn’t understand the finding of the Pentagon’s commission is that they can’t let go of their cognitivist paradigm. They’re committed to the belief that we think what we choose to think and that we do what we think to do. But what neurologists and cognitive researchers — like myself and Dr. Delacourt here — what we know is that that idea is unscientific. It’s contradictory to everything we’ve learned about how the mind really works. It’s a romantic holdover from the metaphysics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What the politicians don’t understand is that these folks aren’t consciously enacting this syndrome. Their brain is doing what it needs to do to keep them alive, and letting them believe what they need to believe. They aren’t malingering cowards any more than the typical psychiatric patient is willfully psychotic.”

  As he concluded this speech, he turned toward Marley at the far end of the table, and Delacourt beside him, expecting support. But they maintained a noncommittal silence.

  Benford seized on the comparison: “Where would Dr. Marley’s patients or Dr. Marley himself have caught this new medical chapter fad?”

  “But I just explained that it isn’t malingering! At least, not necessarily so. It can be real and be non-organic and be unconscious. As we’ve already said, there’s no reason to think Dr. Marley’s cases are even the same syndrome.”

  Delacourt scribbled a private note and fired it over to Marley’s screen:

  Benford and Peters are competing for your alliance.

  Marley smiled, but didn’t reply.

  DiGrandi rejoined the fray: “Actually, we’ve considered the possibility you’re suggesting, Dr. Peters. There’s nothing wrong with it in theory. The trouble is that the reported incidences have been too widespread over too short a time span. Even the most optimistic computer models can’t account for that.”

  “How do you know your models are any good?”

  “These models were developed based on data for the kind of meme-spread you’ve been talking about. We’ve been able to model how political opinions spread through a population. We have a pretty good handle on propagation velocities for different vectors, and we can tie those vectors to idea-types. We can also measure the stability of idea-types — how much they evolve as they spread. For instance, based on propagation speeds, we can categorize White House sex scandals as Level Four infectious memes, very fast, very efficient spreaders, and fairly stable. On the other hand, say, a local wild dog attack in some rural community — that has a very different signature. It spreads fast over a limited range and mutates quite a bit as it goes. By the time it reaches the other end of town traveling by word of mouth, it’s likely to have morphed into a gaggle of crazed geese raping a beagle puppy.”

  That stopped the discussion for a moment. Everyone laughed. The coffeepot started round again.

  DiGrandi, who didn’t share the laugh, continued abruptly: “We’ve developed quite elaborate multi-dimensional matrices taking into account mutability, vectorization, velocity, et cetera, from which we can accurately predict and plot the infiltration of a given idea into a target population.”

  “Can we see that?” Peters said.

  “No.”

  Sikora, in a stage aside to Peters: “Spook stuff.”

  “Now, when we plug into this model the datapoints we collected on the appearance and spread of IDD, the picture we get is quite unlike an informational infiltration.”

  “In the real world,” Sikora said, “is that what we call ‘propaganda’?”

  DiGrandi hardly missed a beat: “Propaganda, in its technical sense, is one sub-class of informational propagation. However, as I was saying, the picture we get for IDD looks very much more like a biological weapon attack than any other type of infiltration.”

  Marley kept doodling notes as he listened. DG — bio weapon theory. But what’s the agent?

  Sikora leaned in. “Now you’re getting into my area, Mr. DiGrandi. There’s no biological organism that turns warriors into pacifists.”

  “Battlefield experience is usually enough to do that,” Marley said.

  “IDD isn’t pacifism,” Benford said. “It’s depersonalization.”

  “Yes, but pacifism is the outcome of interest to us,” Sikora said. “That’s the ‘problem’ we’re here to ‘solve’.”

  Benford seemed to come to a resolution. “Dr. Peters makes some good points about the problematic nature of our data. Without a reliable diagnostic instrument, we don’t know what we have. I have seen some of these young men and women, and I think what’s happening to them is more than just a statistical anomaly. In any case, our first order of business must be to determine whether or not that is the case. Now, none of us have seen any of Dr. Marley’s patients, and I’m not sure it would do us much good anyway. Without several years of history with them, would their personality changes appear as striking to us? I doubt it. And none of you have seen any of our battlefield cases, though at least you have seen some of the recorded interviews. I think that if you had a chance to examine some of the subjects, you’d feel as I do that there’s something very odd about these people. We need to get a handle on what we’re dealing with here. Dr. Marley is the only candidate we have in a position to evaluate both sets of subjects. We all need to be working from the same data. I’m going to see about making that happen.”

  The meeting broke for lunch. Saying she’d return within the hour, Benford departed with Tyminski for parts unknown. Service staff started wheeling in cafeteria food on stainless steel carts.

  Sikora surveyed the offerings. “Cold cuts, baked beans. What’s this? Macaroni? Potato salad. Christ. Always the same shit. Can’t the richest government on the planet afford to feed its loyal servants—”

  “I’m sure the richest government on the planet can,” Peters said. “Too bad we don’t work for them.”

  Sikora shrugged. “Can’t speak Arabic.”

  “I think they have nationality requirements as well,” Delacourt said.

  “Well, I can get papers, of course! Birth record, passport, driver’s license, anything you want.”

  “Legally?” Peters said.

  “More or less.”

  Marley said, “What do you suppose would happen if we decided to excuse ourselves for some real food? Surely there’s a pub or something nearby?”

  Delacourt flashed him a pretty smile. “You might be disappointed,” she said.

  One of the military aides said, “Sir, the NIH campus is on perimeter lockdown.”

  Marley looked at him quizzically, then around the group. “Is it just me,” he said, “or do you folks also feel like this thing is getting more drama than it warrants?”

  “Yes!” Peters said. “Makes me wonder if somebody knows something we don’t.”

  “Are you now or have you ever been,” Sikora demanded, “the witless pawn of a government conspiracy?”

  DiGrandi, frowning, slapped a clump of yellow potato salad on his plate. “I think we should take this job as seriously as our employers do. I think we should assume they have reason to be serious. Let’s not presume their reasons are irrational.”

  Irked, Sikora flashed back, “Can we presume their reasons are secretive? Is that allowed?”

  “Actually,” Marley said, “all I meant was that all of this top-secret national-emergency stuff is a bit surreal. This time yesterday I was still planning to see patients all afternoon.”

  Delacourt’s lips curled around an ironic smile. “I suspect you, Dr. Marley, are the primary reaso
n this — what shall we call it? — phenomenon is receiving such a serious level of attention. I strongly suspect your paper destroyed the hope that this thing was not a potential threat to the civilian population.”

  Sikora said, “You mean their hope that it could be contained?”

  Marley was becoming distracted by Delacourt. He realized he was sneaking little glances at her. “What do you mean by ‘contained’?” he said. “Epidemiologically speaking or public-awareness speaking?”

  “Yes.”

  Peters shook his head. “I still say there’s nothing to contain.”

  “Why contain it anyway?” Sikora said. “What’s the actual threat?”

  “Peace might break out,” Marley said. He returned to his seat with a sandwich and a bottle of water, and put the news on his tablet as he ate.

  The others retook their seats.

  “Is anything happening?” Peters said.

  “Nothing special,” Marley said. “Something about financial terrorism.”

  “The terrorism flavor of the week! How about putting it up on the wall?”

  “How?”

  Tennover materialized at his shoulder and showed him how to drop the channel onto the LEAF’s wall display source. Newsline instantly appeared in two-meter-wide frames on both sides of the room.

  NEWSREADER: … Domestically, of course, Americans are feeling the effects of these issues in their everyday lives. The cost of everything seems to be going nowhere but up. Some analysts worry that the economy could be on the verge of spinning out of control. Newsline has learned that the President’s Council of Economic Advisors has been quietly developing contingency plans for the federal government to take active control of the economy — if it’s necessary to prevent a monetary meltdown. According to sources inside the White House, these plans lay out a series of steps the government could execute to take control of the economic infrastructure…

  Benford returned after forty-five minutes and dropped a bomb on the meal.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a C-17 troop transport departing Andrews in three hours. Dr. Marley, did you bring your passport with you this morning?”