The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 23

Once I recovered from the initial shock of seeing him on-screen, I rushed to turn up the volume.

“…you believe the government is not just violating our rights, but actually harming the country by outlawing these ‘smart drugs’?” the reporter asked.

My brother smiled. “Nancy, I believe the prejudice against these drugs is harming humanity as a species. Our ability to reason, to debate, to communicate in abstractions and cooperate in large numbers: these are the advancements that have given us an unprecedented ability to thrive and dominate our environment. But it doesn’t end here. There’s so much more that we could do if we could overcome our ridiculous tendency for argument and distrust, jealous rivalry and selfish violence.”

“And you think Neuritol can solve this? It sounds like you’re talking about world peace. Isn’t that expecting a bit much?”

“Humanity can solve these problems,” Paul said, his voice ringing with earnest appeal. “Cooperation is a hallmark of our species. We just need to reach the next step in our evolution. Neuritol isn’t just a drug that wears off and leaves you wanting more. You can think of it like a brain upgrade. I’m serious about this. Those who are willing to go to the next level are going to be the leaders of society, in the sciences, in healthcare, in politics, in business. Those who aren’t willing are going to be left behind.”

“Wow. That’s quite a vision, Dr. Johns. After our break, we’ll return to this interview and our discussion of Neuritol: Is it a genius drug, or is it just the latest harmful addiction to sweep through our schools? We’ll be back after these messages.”

“Well, that’s bold,” Mei-lin said.

My jaw worked a few times before I could make it speak. “No one’s going to buy that nonsense. It’s like he’s selling wizard oil from a traveling medicine show.”

“And thousands of people bought that wizard oil,” my mother said. “And still do, more or less.”

“What worries me,” I said, “is how much Paul seems to believe what he’s saying. That’s not really Paul talking. It’s the fungus, manipulating him.”

My mother’s expression was grave. “I think we have to face the possibility that what we see on that screen is who Paul is now. What he really believes.”

The commercials ended and the blond reporter reappeared on the screen. “With me is Dr. Paul Johns, a mycologist with the University of Maryland, who earlier today filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice for violating what he claims is a public right to take Neuritol, the latest so-called ‘smart drug’ that promises increased mental capabilities.” She turned to Paul. “Dr. Johns, does Neuritol really live up to the hype? After all, it’s been through no formal safety testing, no drug review process.”

“Nancy, what day were you born?”

She hesitated a beat, not wanting to give up control of the interview. “November 21st.”

“What year?”

She blushed. “1998.”

“You were born on a Wednesday,” Paul said. “You are eight thousand, five hundred, and seventy-seven days old. Your last birthday was on a Sunday, and your next will be on a Monday.”

The reporter gave a little gasp of delight and clapped her hands. “Amazing,” she said.

“The last commercial break lasted one hundred and eighteen seconds. The man who touched up your makeup during the break is in love with you, but you don’t return his affections. You’re five foot eight and a hundred and twenty pounds, and you said the word ‘Neuritol’ sixteen times during our interview so far.”

The reporter beamed her TV smile. “And how could you possibly know all that?”

Paul leaned forward in his chair. “This is no magic trick. Anyone can gain this level of intellect and awareness of the world around them. That’s why I’m seeking this temporary restraining order from the courts—to put a stop to this ill-conceived and uninformed attack on Neuritol and give Congress a chance to declare it legal. Neuritol isn’t addictive or dangerous. It doesn’t belong in the same category as narcotics.”

“Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. Any last comments to our viewers?”

Paul looked into the camera. “Try it for yourself. Don’t wait for the government to decide what’s best for you. Then write your representatives and tell them Neuritol should be legal.”

“Thank you, Dr. Johns.” The image cut to a head-on view of the reporter. “The lawsuit was filed in Arizona court today by Dr. Johns’ attorneys. Senator Velasquez, a Republican from Texas, has already gone on record saying that he agrees with the suit, and not only claims that Neuritol ought to be legalized but that its use should actually be encouraged in our schools.”

“Why file the suit in Arizona?” Mei-lin asked.

“Maybe that’s where he is,” I said. “Or maybe that’s where the crackdown is particularly active.”

“Didn’t you say he had a university lab where he was studying this organism?” Mei-lin asked.

“Yeah, he’s at UMD.”

“Any chance we could get in there and look at his stuff? Because, you’re right, the way to attack this thing is to understand it as a fungal organism, not as a brain disease. If I could see his notes, maybe examine some of his cultures, it could go a long way. Shortcut anything I could do myself.”

“Paul’s been missing for days,” I said. “The university hasn’t seen him. I guess it’s possible they would let us go and poke around, if we could spin them a good story. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what to look for there, but maybe you would.”

She shrugged. “It would be worth a try.”

We took Mei-lin’s BMW down I-95. It was the first really hot day of the year, and she cranked her air conditioning to keep us comfortable. The sun brightened the campus quad to a brilliant green and lit the brick buildings to postcard quality.

We found the main office, but all nearby parking was taken. She put the car in park and flipped the blinkers on. I got out and trotted up the stairs. It didn’t occur to me until I opened the front door that it was Sunday—I had long since lost track of the days.

I found one student with bloodshot eyes manning the desk, but she said all the keys were in a safe, and she didn’t have any authority to let me into anywhere. When I came back outside and climbed in the car, Mei-lin had her phone pressed to her ear.

“Mommy loves you,” she said. “Be good for Daddy, okay? And help take care of your brother. Yes, I love you, too. Bye-bye. Okay. Bye-bye.” Her voice abruptly dropped the child-like tone. “Yeah, I’ll be home when I can, okay? I’m sorry about your game. This is important. I will. Bye.”

“How old?” I asked when she hung up.

Mei-lin sighed. “My son’s two, and my daughter is four going on twelve. Wants to do everything herself these days. Yesterday, I found her making her own peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Which meant not just the bread, but her hands, and the table, and her dress, and her hair were covered with sticky mess. I had to bathe her for an hour to get it all out.”

I grinned. “Good thing they’re cute at that age.”

“You’re telling me. You have any kids?”

“Not hardly. Not even a girlfriend. Maybe someday, though.”

“My two-year-old’s favorite game right now is to collect things from all over the house and carry them around in a box. I can’t tell you how many things we’ve lost that way. He’s probably driving my husband crazy. Brad hates it when I’m away on weekends.”

“Should we head on to the lab?”

She put the car into gear. “Might as well. No point coming out here without at least giving it a try.”

We drove around in circles for a while, trying to find a parking space, and eventually found a spot only a few blocks away from the Plant Sciences building. I had little hope that we would be able to get inside. Compared to Fort Meade, it might be laughable security, but that didn’t mean I knew how to get past it. The doors were locked, requiring an ID card that we didn’t have.

Walking passed manicured lawns in the bright sunlight, it seemed impossible that in Brazil American soldiers were fighting and dying, or that the beautiful brick building in front of us might house a sample of an organism dangerous enough to topple governments.

“Now we get creative,” I said. I knew the grad students who worked with Paul in the lab must have access as well, and I’d used my dad’s iPhone to look them up on the drive over. I chose the first more or less at random, a woman named Jintara Sirisukha. She answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Sirisukha?” I said, probably mangling the pronunciation.

“Yes?” She sounded suspicious. I figured I had about five seconds before she hung up on me.

“My name is Martin Wilson,” I said, adopting an official tone. “I’m an investigative agent with the CDC, and we have reason to believe your lab is host to a Class Five hypervirus.” Mei-lin raised her eyebrows at me and mouthed: hypervirus? I shrugged.

“My lab?” said the voice on the phone. “You mean the mycology lab?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “We’ve sourced the vector to the Plant Sciences building, and we need to inspect every room. The provost gave us your name as someone with weekend access. I’m sorry to inconvenience you, ma’am, but it’s a serious situation.”

“Okay,” she said. “Give me five minutes. I’ll be right over.”

I put the phone back in my pocket. “And that’s how it’s done,” I said.

Mei-lin put her hands on her hips. “You’re kidding me. That worked?”

“She’s on her way.”

“If there’s such a thing as a hypervirus, I’ve never heard of it. And the CDC only has four biohazard levels.”

“I was improvising,” I said. “Don’t argue with success.”

“And what happens when she arrives and finds us with no identification, no biocontainment gear, no protective suits? We don’t have so much as a face mask.”

I grinned sheepishly. “You’ll just have to talk medical at her, I guess. If not, we’ll go to plan B.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. I’ll make it up if we need it.”

Jintara arrived, an attractive Asian woman in jeans and a purple T-shirt who spoke with an accent I guessed to be Thai. I explained that we were just the administrative investigators, ensuring access for the full containment crew that was on its way. It sounded lame even to me, but Jintara didn’t question my story. She seemed more concerned with what would become of the experiments she had underway and how our investigation might contaminate her samples.

“I really don’t think it could have come from us,” she said. “I know everyone who’s gone in and out of that lab, and no one’s sick with anything.” She said a girl named Sarah up on the third floor had been out sick for two weeks, and I pretended to take down her information.

She led us down the echoing hallway to the Chaverri Mycology Lab and swiped her ID. Mei-lin put a hand on her arm. “You’d better stay out here,” she said.

Jintara looked uncertain. “We won’t touch anything,” I said. “We have labs of our own; we know how important it is not to introduce contaminants.”

“Fine,” she said. “Just be careful, okay?”

My phone rang. My dad’s phone, really, but it was amazing how quickly I thought of it as my own. I looked at the screen. It was Andrew.

“That’s the containment crew now,” I said. I took several steps back down the hall and shielded my mouth with my hand. “Hey, what do you need?” I asked.

Mei-lin opened the lab door.

It was too easy. I should have suspected something, but I had been too enamored with my own cleverness. The moment the door opened, a cloud of white powder billowed out, right into Mei-lin’s face. By pure luck, I was far enough away that it didn’t touch me, but Mei-lin, covered in the stuff, coughed and gagged and clawed at her throat.

I stared at Jintara, whose smug smile told the whole story. I took a step toward Mei-lin, but she held out her hands and screamed at me to get back. I reversed direction and held my shirt over my mouth. Ignoring Jintara, Mei-lin yanked a fire extinguisher off the wall. She raised it over her head and smashed it against the sprinkler head protruding from the ceiling. The first blow glanced off ineffectually, but the second struck it full on, breaking the frangible bulb inside and releasing the water.

Mei-lin turned her face up into the stream, letting it cascade over her body, drenching her. She opened her mouth wide, rinsing, rubbing her hands over her face and skin. When she stepped back, her clothes running rivulets onto the floor, she caught my eyes, and I could see the terror in them. We both knew that powder had been filled with fungal spores, and that the important ones were in her lungs, where she couldn’t wash them away.

“Paul said you’d come,” Jintara said. “It took you longer than he thought.”

I saw the expression on Mei-lin’s face shift from fear to anger. Without a word, she picked up the fire extinguisher and swung it at Jintara’s head. Jintara wasn’t expecting it and barely got a hand up to defend herself. The extinguisher connected with the side of her face with an audible gong, and she went down. It wasn’t enough to knock her out, but it wiped the smile off her face, and opened a bloody cut on her forehead.

With a cry, Mei-lin raised the extinguisher again and went in for another blow. Jintara was ready this time and scrambled away. The red container struck the cinderblock wall and rang with the impact. Jintara got to her feet and backed down the hall toward where we’d come in. “Give it a day,” she said, “and you’ll thank me for this.” She pushed through the double doors, and we heard her footsteps running away.

Mei-lin dropped the extinguisher and stalked toward the open door to the lab.

“We have to get you back to the hospital,” I said.

“First things first. Let’s get what we came for.”

I started to follow her into the lab, but she waved me back. “There are still spores in the air.”

“He won’t have left anything of value behind,” I said. “Not if he knew we were coming.”

Mei-lin switched on the lights. “If this is going to be my last day with control of my own mind,” she said, “I’m going to use it fighting this thing.”

I peered into the lab from a distance. I saw the same antiseptically neat arrangement of microscopes and glassware as the first time I’d been there. The rows of petri dishes on the central table, however, were gone. Mei-lin dragged a chair over to the doorway and stood on it, examining the setup that had dropped the powder when the door was opened. She pulled it down and showed me: The powder had been kept in a plastic bag tied with a string attached to the door, which had unraveled when pulled. Whoever had set the trap must have climbed out the window afterward.

Mei-lin put the plastic bag in a large specimen bag she found in a drawer, and sealed it shut. She yanked the wires out of each of the three computers in the lab and stacked them up to carry away. I had as much chance of gaining useful information from them as I did from interrogating a Bunsen burner, but I knew if I brought them to Fort Meade, there were people who could get them to spill all their secrets, whether the hard drives had been wiped or not.

We carried everything out to Mei-lin’s car. She handed me the keys. “I don’t trust myself,” she said. “Get us back to the hospital as fast as you can.”

On the way, she called a coworker in the emergency room. “Lauren,” she said. “I’m inbound with a critical case of invasive aspergillosis. I need a bed and a 5 mg/hour amphotericin B drip. Also, medical restraints.”

“On it,” I heard the tinny voice reply from the phone. “That’s a serious dosage. Is the patient CDT?”

“No,” she said. “The patient is just desperate.” She switched the phone off.

“CDT?” I asked.

Mei-lin grinned. “It stands for ‘Chronic Donut Toxicity.’ One of the many unflattering terms doctors disguise with acronyms or inscrutable terminology. She was asking if the patient was obese.”

“This is a common term?”

“Not commonly used in front of patients,” she said. “But yeah, it gets thrown around, at least by some docs. There are others. An ‘OAP’ for an ‘Over-Anxious Parent.’ GPO is ‘Good for Parts Only.’ And if you show up in the ER because, say, you were trying to jump your motorcycle over the creek and misjudged the distance, you might hear the term ‘fecal encephalopathy.’”

I thought about it, then laughed when I figured it out. “Wow, docs can be pretty nasty,” I said.

She shrugged. “Some of them are arrogant assholes, no question,” she said. “But everyone develops a bit of a gallows humor. It’s a tough profession, working with frightened and angry patients and families, seeing a lot more death from day to day than most people do, and inevitably feeling like some of it is at least partially your fault. The dark humor is a way to cope.”

My phone rang. I realized I’d never heard whatever it was that Andrew had called to tell me. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, dropped it in my lap, and told it to answer the call.

“What’s happening with you?” Andrew said. “Did you get disconnected?”

“It’s a long story. What do you need?” I said, talking loud enough that he would hear me over the background noise of the car.

“You were right about the Neuritol,” he said. “It fits all the patterns exactly. Unfortunately, it looks like the communication in tribal languages doesn’t start until weeks after the drug has been widely distributed in a geographic area. So it’s not just a matter of cracking down in the cities where we’re intercepting those messages. We have reason to suspect a significant spread into Dallas, Atlanta, Kansas City, even Chicago.

“The president and his staff are all on board now, and the DEA, FBI, and CDC are starting to flood the affected areas. I’m just afraid it’s not going to be enough. I’ve been recommending he declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard, but no one’s willing to take that step yet.”

“It won’t take long. Once the CDC sees how fast this thing is spreading, they’ll want to shut down every road in the country.”

“I’m just afraid that by the time they do, it’ll be too late.”

By the time we reached the ER, Mei-lin was coughing violently and looked pale. The symptoms had come on quickly, but then she had probably breathed in enough spores to infect an army. Her lungs must be coated with them, each taking root and prompting a surge of immune response. It occurred to me that such a large exposure might very well kill her before the fungus could take hold. Her clothes were still wet from the sprinkler, and she shivered uncontrollably.

She used her access to walk straight past triage and into the back, where she found Lauren, a painfully thin, forty-something woman with dyed blond hair and a serious expression. Lauren took control, stripping away her wet clothes and getting her warm and dry. She started the antifungal IV Mei-lin had asked for, but drew the line on restraints.

“You don’t need to be tied down for a pulmonary mycosis,” Lauren said.

“I’ll explain everything,” Mei-lin said. “Just do it, please, before I change my mind.”

“Change your mind? You’re freaking me out, here, Mei. You’re not in any danger of—”

Mei-lin ignored her, using her right hand to strap her left to the rail. “Neil?” she said. “Please?”

“Oh, for heavens’ sake,” Lauren said. She tied the strap around Meilin’s other hand. “Now will you please tell me what’s going on?”

“Ankles, too,” Mei-lin said.

When Lauren had reluctantly complied, Mei-lin gave her a quick summary of what she had inhaled and what the symptoms were likely to be.

“Give me a consent form,” she said. “I don’t want to be taken off of this until I’ve had a full course of treatment, no matter what I tell you, no matter how I beg or threaten to sue, you hear me? A full course.”

Lauren, still suspicious but rattled by her vehemence, agreed.

“Find someone who can study the spores we collected,” Mei-lin said to me. “The best option for ending this thing is to find a cure.”

“You should do it,” I said, but she dismissed me with an annoyed gesture.

“I’m compromised. I can’t study it; you could never believe what I told you. I can’t even advise you, because I might steer you wrong.”

“The antifungals,” I said, indicating the IV. “If they work, then you’ll be back on your feet…”

She shook her head. “The one constant with fungal infections is how easily they can come back. That’s why we tell people to take the medication for years. People think it’s gone because they’ve felt fine for months, and they stop taking the pills. Next thing you know, they’re back in the ER, and the infection’s twice as bad as it was the first time around.

“Fungus is remarkably similar to us, biologically—much more so than plants or bacteria. It makes them great sources for pharmaceuticals, but it also makes it hard to devise drugs to attack them without also attacking healthy human cells. Often, antifungals will simply halt the growth of the fungus, not eradicate it. Which is why it’s so easy for them to come back.”

She paused for a fit of coughing. When she caught her breath again, there were tears in her eyes. “You can’t trust me anymore,” she said. “Yes, I hope this course of treatment will cure me. Yes, I hope I’ll be up and about in a few days and in full control of my own mind. But even if I am, you won’t know for sure. The best thing you can do for me is to find someone who can continue this research without me.”

I nodded. I felt bad leaving her, though I expected she had friends in the hospital who would see that she was well cared for. I took one last look at her, arms and legs tied down at her own request, and felt a surge of admiration. “I won’t give up,” I said. “I won’t stop fighting this until I’ve found a way through.”

“Get moving, then,” she said. “I’ll still be here when you get back.”

Lauren caught me on my way out of the ER. “Is this for real?”

“It is,” I said. “Everything she told you, about how this organism works, is true. Don’t take her off that medication.”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “That dosage is high. Like, really high. I would never give a patient her size that much.”

“I guess she wants to be really, really sure she kills it.”

“She might just kill herself instead.”

I looked her in the eyes. “Trust her,” I said. “Don’t change the dosage, and don’t stop the treatment. No matter what she tells you.”

Lauren held my gaze for a beat. “Okay,” she said finally. “Okay. I can do that.”