The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 26

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Shaunessy said. “A fungus may resemble a computer network, but it’s organic. It communicates through nutrients and enzymes and chemical neurotransmitters. It can’t interface with an Ethernet cable or make sense of network protocol.”

“It doesn’t need to,” I said. “This cable is unshielded. That means the hyphae wrapped around it are bathed in the electromagnetic radiation coming from those wires. It’s what we sometimes do to tap enemy networks.”

“But we know the protocols. We know how raw signal is converted into useful information. The fungus doesn’t.”

“Again, I don’t think it needs to. It’s a giant neural network. Data goes in, the network responds, and then it gets feedback. The feedback enables it to strengthen neural paths that give favorable results. It doesn’t need to understand the data in order to learn from it. It’s the same behavior it uses in a forest, only with a different kind of data. Paul talks about it ‘learning’ and making ‘coordinated responses’ and ‘collective decisions,’ but it’s not really deciding anything, not like we do. It’s just strengthening pathways that give it the best feedback and culling those that don’t.”

She thought for a minute. “I don’t buy it. The data running through these servers affects things far away. Equipment off site, communication with other agencies, the indirect effects of human decisions based on the data. I don’t see how just accessing the data would be enough, not without the intelligence to interpret it at some level.”

I looked around. “Where is everyone else?”

“Who?” she said.

“The server staff. There are always people in here, maintaining the racks. Where are they?”

“They must have gotten out.”

Understanding dawned in both of us at once. “They were infected,” I said. “That’s the other piece of the puzzle. The fungus did have intelligence to help it understand what it found.”

We sat on the concrete stairs next to the barricaded door, our backs to the wall, looking out over the dark server room. Thousands of LED lights from the racks twinkled like a miniature galaxy. The alarm had shut off, leaving us in what felt like silence, even though the hum of the servers made a constant background sound.

“How do you know it doesn’t understand?” Shaunessy asked.

“What?”

“The fungus. You said it’s like a neural net. So is our brain. So how do you know it doesn’t understand what it’s doing?”

“Well, I guess it depends what you mean by ‘understand.’ We have centralized locations for language, creative thought, intellect, abstract thinking. A fungus doesn’t. It’s just a network, every part the same as the others. It’s a complex data filter and decision tree. It accomplishes some incredibly sophisticated responses, but it’s not aware of itself.”

“At least, not until now,” Shaunessy said.

“What do you mean?”

“Now its network includes thousands of human beings. Humans who do think. Who are aware of themselves.”

“Interesting,” I said. “It has conscious components, but it itself is not conscious. It’s not centralized—no one human is critical to its existence—but it can take advantage of all the creativity and problem-solving skills of its human nodes.”

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” she said. “The human race? This is why we have such trouble getting fungi out of our house or off of our toenails. How can we fight something that doesn’t have a central organ to destroy? You have to eradicate it completely, or it keeps coming back.”

I sighed and leaned the back of my head against the wall. “It’s funny. I always thought it was the computers we had to be afraid of. You know, AIs getting so smart that they wouldn’t need humans anymore. The great war between the biological minds and the artificial ones.”

Shaunessy shook her head. “They’re not even close.”

“Really? I keep hearing that the Singularity is only twenty years away.”

She laughed. “It’s been twenty years away for the last sixty years. But it’s nonsense. The computers we have aren’t brains. They’re machines that manipulate one set of symbols into another set of symbols. They don’t respond to their environment; they don’t grow.”

“Sure they do,” I said. “What about deep learning? Cognitive computing? Neuromorphic chips? They’ve got computer chips now with as many synapses as the human brain.”

“That’s just it. We’ve taken a small part of how our brain works—the patterns of dendrites and axons and synapses—and we’ve built computer architectures around them. But that’s all it is—a symbolic machine inspired by the human brain. Real brains are biological pieces of meat inextricably connected to the bodies that host them and the environments they inhabit in a million essential ways. A computer is a complex tool, but it’s not a brain. It requires the human operator to be its body, to be its environment, by writing its algorithm and feeding it data. If we really want to make an artificial construct that can think like we do, we have to start over with a completely different concept.”

“Like what?”

“Well…” Shaunessy took a few of her braids in her hands and fingered them absently. “It might be something more like your fungus.”

“My fungus?”

“You know what I mean. Your brother’s fungus. The fungus. An architecture that doesn’t just manipulate symbols but grows organically from interaction with its environment. Intelligence ultimately isn’t Boolean. It isn’t about logic. It’s physical. It’s a continuous chemical give-and-take with everything around it. Is it getting hot in here?”

I blinked at the sudden change of topic. “Um, I guess.” Now that I thought about it, the temperature was rising. This room had always been chilly.

“The cooling system must be down with the lights,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a backup system on the same generator that’s still powering the machines, but maybe it malfunctioned. If they don’t fix that fast, it’s really going to start cooking down here. Those racks put out a lot of heat.”

“Should we… I don’t know… turn them off?”

“There are thousands of them. And some of them are hosting some pretty critical systems. We can’t just kill them.”

“Better them than us,” I said.

“Hopefully they’ll get us out of here before that becomes a problem.”

It didn’t take long before the heat started to get uncomfortable. Shaunessy checked the temperature reading on one of the servers and reported that it was ninety-five degrees in the room. “The processors will start frying before we’re in any real danger from the heat,” she said.

“I can’t tell you how reassuring that is,” I said.

“This is what I’m talking about, though,” she said. “This is why computers will never be intelligent.”

“Because they get too hot?”

“I’m serious,” she said. “It’s like the guy in the Apollo 13 movie who says, ‘Power is everything.’ The kind of computers you’re talking about, the ones that rival the human brain for processing nodes, consume on the order of four million watts of power. The chunk of meat in your head—which is not a computer, by the way—uses twenty watts. Not twenty million. Just twenty. Our brains are efficient thermodynamic systems, designed to help us produce valuable work from the potential energy around us in the world. Computers are simply extensions of our minds—tools we use that heighten that production value.”

I waved my hands at the servers. “So if these were racks of brains instead of computers, we wouldn’t be getting so hot right now,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Although… ew.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for a while, sweating. After a while, she checked the temperature again, and reported that it was up to ninety-seven degrees.

My mouth felt dry. “Maybe we should have asked Andrew and Melody to pass in some water bottles before they evacuated.”

“They won’t abandon us,” Shaunessy said. “You know they’re doing everything they can to get the lockdown reversed and get us out of here.”

Sitting there staring down at the carpet of white mushrooms made me uncomfortable, so I replaced the flooring tiles I had removed before.

“There,” I said. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“How does it even grow down there? Doesn’t it need sunlight?” Shaunessy said.

“Nope. Fungus thrives on radiation. That’s like the perfect environment for it down there. Lots of heat, lots of energy.”

“What if we could control its environment?” Shaunessy asked. Her gaze was focused inward, not really looking at me, in an expression I had come to associate with the emergence of a brilliant idea.

“What do you mean?”

“You said it learns from its environment. That it’s not really intelligent or even clever, it just filters data and finds the most efficient beneficial response.”

“That’s right.”

“So, what if we could control the data it processed? What if we could steer its actions by simulating a false environment, causing it to make choices that were actually detrimental, but because we controlled its feedback, it strengthened the wrong pathways?”

“Virtual reality, fungus style.”

“Something like that. If we could get it to interpret negative feedback as if it were positive, then it would increasingly pursue things that were harmful to it. It would destroy itself.”

“Okay,” I said. “How do we do that?”

She fell silent.

“I mean, we’re talking about a lot of inputs, right? Thousands of people scattered everywhere, and who knows how many square miles of rainforest. We can’t actually control that, can we?”

“Not all of it. But it’s not one continuous network. The people aren’t wired together—as you said, they have to communicate through language. And this mycelium”—she pointed to the flooring I had replaced—“can’t be directly connected to the one in Brazil. If we could just fool this one, we might be able to affect the actions of the rest of the network.”

I wiped the sweat off my face. “I’m having trouble imagining what kind of mistaken action on the part of the fungus could actually have a serious harmful effect.”

“What if we could convince it that some kind of attack on our part was to its benefit, so it didn’t try to stop us?”

“Okay,” I said. “What kind of attack? You could firebomb the entire Amazon jungle and still probably not kill all of it. And even if you did, it would live on in the lungs of each infected person.”

“You’re right,” she said. “What we need is something it can do to itself. Some kind of exponential decay, where it interprets negative feedback as positive, and thus increasingly favors the self-destructive activity, until the entire thing is gone.”

The heat was getting unbearable. I stood and walked to the first row of racks. The temperature readout now showed 99 degrees.

“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Or find some way to get the cooling system back on. If the heat keeps rising like this, we’re going to be in big trouble.”

Shaunessy tapped the console and the screen came to life. “I don’t know what I can do from here, but I’ll try. Maybe there’s some networked controller I can access.”

“To control the temperature? Or to get us out of here?”

“I don’t know. Probably neither. Give me a bit.”

“Okay.”

She started typing, rapidly bringing up programs and switching between windows. I watched her work for a few minutes, but I couldn’t follow what she was doing, and I figured she could make better progress without me staring over her shoulder. I took a walk around the circumference of the cavernous room, which now felt more like a sauna. Phones were mounted at regular intervals. I tried each of them in turn, but they were all dead. No surprise, really—they were voice-over-IP, phones that sent voice data through an internet protocol and thus required access to the network to operate. They had been disconnected from the outside by the same lockdown procedure that had isolated the servers.

Sweat ran into my eyes. I wondered how hot the processors themselves must be, to raise the temperature of the room this much, and how much hotter they could get before they fried. It seemed surprising to me that both the primary and backup cooling systems would have shut down. In case of an external attack, the idea was to protect the computers, not melt them down. Why would they power the cooling from the outside only? I stopped walking. The answer, of course, was that they wouldn’t.

I turned and ran back to where Shaunessy stood, her attention still focused on the screen. “I think we’re in trouble.”

She didn’t look up. “You’re just figuring that out now?”

“Even more trouble.” I leaned against the rack next to her, trying to catch her eye. “Why is the backup cooling system down?”

“Same reason the lights are out. The lockdown switched us over to internal generator power only.”

“But wouldn’t cooling be an essential system? Shouldn’t that be on the circuit with the generator?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe somebody screwed up. Put them on the wrong circuit, or mangled a config file or something.”

“For that matter,” I said, “why is the primary cooling system down? It doesn’t make sense. You don’t shut off the air for a lockdown unless you want to destroy the servers. And if you wanted that, you wouldn’t power them in the first place—you’d erase them and shut them down, or else fry them all with a power surge or something.”

She was only half paying attention to me. “Well, if you figure it out, let me know.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. There’s only one thing I can think of that actually benefits from overheating this room.”

She finally stopped typing and looked up, frustrated. “What?”

“Darkness, heat, lots of radiation? Those are ideal conditions for the fungus. You saw all those little mushrooms down there, right?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s creating the environment it needs for those mushrooms to sporulate.”

Her eyes locked on mine. “Sporulate. As in…”

“As in, release thousands of spores into the air that we’re breathing. It has to be pretty inefficient to transport Neuritol into the country through cocaine trafficking channels all the way from South America. It would make sense for the fungus to create new centers for spore dissemination right here, in the United States. There’s been no sign that, growing in humans, it can actually reach a fruiting stage and reproduce. Which means the fungus needs large, dark, hot areas where it can grow undisturbed for weeks or months, until it’s ready.”

“Like right here.”

“Yeah. Given how long ago Paul was here, this may even be the first in the country. I doubt it’s the last, though. There are plenty of other large server farms. Nuclear power plants would probably work well, too. The server staff probably planned this. Programmed it, even.”

“So, if the cooling system is off, and there’s no ventilation, how will the spores get out?” Shaunessy asked. “I mean, it won’t be great for us, but nobody else is going to get sick if the spores are trapped in this room.”

“My guess is, once the temperature has reached some kind of trigger point for the mushrooms, and the spores release, then the ventilation system will turn back on. It’ll blow them everywhere in the complex. Anybody still in the building, or who comes back inside, will breathe them in for sure.”

Shaunessy grimaced and rubbed at her temples. “Is there anything we can do about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

She turned back to the keyboard. “Then I guess I’d better keep working.”

“It looks like we’re going to get that great war between the artificial and biological minds after all,” I said. “Only I didn’t expect to be rooting for the artificial ones.”

I left her alone to work. I remembered the emergency storage locker under the stairs and decided that if any situation qualified as an emergency, this one did. I opened it and examined its contents.

Melody had been right: it contained everything I could think of and more. Fire extinguishers and radiation protection tablets, blankets and flashlights, matches and flares and a two-way radio. A box of ration bars and bottled water and canned food, complete with can opener. I counted five first aid kits, three bottles of vitamins, and a defibrillator.

She had been wrong about one thing, though: the locker contained exactly what I was looking for. A dozen full-face biological warfare gas masks with extra filters. Two HAZMAT suits would have been perfect, but I would take what I could get. I strapped one of the gas masks around my head and brought the other one to Shaunessy.

“I’m making progress,” she said. “Whoever did this locked down access to the controllers. It’s clearly intentional. But I think it’s still physically connected, which means I can hack my way in, if I can figure out how.”

I held out the mask. “Which means you’ll have to be alive and still uninfected yourself,” I said, pointing at the mask she still held in her hands.

“Right.” She struggled with the straps for a few moments but finally got it over her head and pulled tight.

“How’s that look?” she asked. The masks contained amplifiers for our voices, but the words came out muffled and with a bit of an echo.

I gave her a thumbs up. “Fashion statement.” If that made her smile, I couldn’t tell.

“I’ll let you know if I figure anything out,” she said, putting her fingers back to the keyboard.

Every phone in the server room rang at once, startling us.

“Does that mean rescue?” I asked. “Are we connected again?” I ran toward the nearest phone.

She tapped on the keyboard. “Yes!” she called after me. “We’re connected to the outside!”

I picked up the phone, expecting to hear Melody or Andrew or maybe even Ronstadt. “Hello?” I said. It was awkward getting the phone to my ear around the mask, and I hoped I could be understood at the other end.

“Hello, Neil.”

It took me a few moments to recognize the voice. It was my brother.

“Paul?”

“I don’t have much time.” His voice was smooth, controlled, though some static crackled on the line.

“I found your little present,” I said, my surprise blossoming into rage. “Is this how you repay my trust? I bring you into a secure facility, I vouch for you, and you betray me? I don’t care what you have growing in your head, that was pretty low. I thought you were on our side then, but I guess it was all a sham. You never cared about me or Dad or any of us.”

“I was on your side,” Paul said, unruffled by my outburst. “I’ve always been on your side. That’s why I want you to experience what I have.”

“Give it up, Paul. I don’t want what you’re selling.”

“That’s only because you’ve never tried it. Once you get over your prejudice, you’ll see that this is the best thing ever to happen to the human race. This is what will take us to the next level. You have no idea the things we’re accomplishing already. There’s no coercion here. There’s just people cooperating to an unprecedented degree, with the mental tools to accomplish more than they ever dreamed was possible.”

“You can skip the Illuminati speech,” I said. “I’m not joining your cult. And don’t act all innocent. Your side is killing people.”

“Only to defend ourselves.”

“Oh, come on. Carefully planned assassinations are not self-defense.”

“Which is better?” Paul asked. “The surgical removal of a repressive leader or wide-scale war involving thousands of combatants who have no connection to the issues being fought over? We’ve removed a few people, yes. You’re the ones who turned it into a war.”

I heard a clunking sound from inside the nearest wall and then a steady hum. The ventilation system, turning back on. “This is fascinating and all, but I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Come and see me, Neil,” he said, his voice earnest. “Let me show you what we’re accomplishing here.”

I hesitated, thinking of Dad. “Paul? You can resist this. You don’t have to let it control you. Don’t let a parasite tell you how to think or what to do.”

He laughed. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “I hope someday you’ll understand. I’m serious. Come and see me. I’ll be waiting for you.”

A grinding motor noise cut in, and I saw the steel gate begin to lift from the door. Shaunessy ran up behind me. “Time to go,” she said.

I hung up the phone. Five men in HAZMAT suits, carrying automatic rifles, ducked under the rising gate and ran into the room, the barrels of their rifles sweeping over us. I raised my hands over my head.

“Don’t worry,” Shaunessy said. “They’re on our side.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“If they weren’t,” she said, “they wouldn’t bother with the suits.”