“Wait. You’re kidding me. Invading?”
“I forgot. You’ve been out of contact.”
“Not that long. Less than forty-eight hours.”
“The way this is going, you could step out to use the bathroom and be behind the intelligence curve by the time you got back. But yes, Colombia and Venezuela have declared war and are sending troops into the Amazon—including the Brazilian states—to clear out foreign contamination. We’ve already had unconfirmed reports of massacres, both of foreigners and natives, though our intelligence is spotty.”
“But, Colombia and Venezuela?” I said. It didn’t make any sense at all. “They’ve been at each other’s throats for years. Venezuela supports Colombia’s rebel factions. Their governments are totally, philosophically opposed to each other.”
“You’re preaching to the choir. Nothing we think we know is holding true anymore. But this is what’s happening.”
We turned a corner and saw Melody facing down a Marine colonel who stood a head taller and out-massed her by probably sixty pounds. “We’re done here,” Melody said. “Don’t talk to me about ‘interface challenges,’ as if that means anything. Either get me the information I need, or tell me you don’t have the balls to cross agency lines to get it.”
“It’s not that simple,” the man said. “The exploitation goes through two different stovepipe systems, built by two different contractors for two different agencies. They just don’t talk to each other.”
“All I’m hearing is ‘I can’t’ when I needed that data yesterday. Go bore someone else with your excuses.”
The colonel stormed out, while Shaunessy and I watched in awe. Melody was not technically in his chain of command, and so couldn’t give him orders, much less dress him down for failing to fulfill them. But everyone knew she had the ear and trust of those who did give the orders, which amounted to almost the same thing.
Melody smiled at me. “I hate it when one of my own has to be rescued by the CIA. They never let you live it down. Welcome to São Paulo.”
“Having trouble with the help?” I asked.
“Trying to weed out those who kiss other asses to cover their own,” she said. “There are people who get things done, and people who just get in the way.”
“What’s the problem?”
“All our connection models are falling to pieces,” she said. “Half of how we do business is by building up these huge graphs of known connections. X is a known associate of Y who is part of organization A who hired company B, which funds the sale of arms to country Q, like that. We use them to track terrorist networks, shifting alliances, potential defectors, all sorts of things. Only we’re finding that our connection models here in South America are completely wrong. People who previously had no known connection are suddenly bosom friends. Organizations with opposing goals are suddenly working together. Old alliances are crumbling and new ones are taking their place, as if someone ran them through a random number generator. I’m trying to verify our models against data from other agencies, but it’s apparently impossible for the CIA and NRO and NSA to, you know, share critical information with each other.”
“So, about that,” I said.
“About what? The intelligence community’s cripplingly dysfunctional bureaucracy?”
“No. The failing connection models. I might have an idea why.”
“Do tell.”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re arrogant and headstrong and you have no sense of self-restraint, but you’re not crazy. If you have an idea, spit it out.”
“Nobody’s acting like they should, right? We have sworn enemies becoming allies, security agents killing the people they protect, indigenous tribesmen working with high-tech encryption. And suddenly everyone wants to protect the Amazon so bad they’re willing to kill for it.”
“I thought you were going to tell me something I don’t know.”
“What if it’s the fungus?”
The statement hung in the air, stark and ridiculous, and I waited for her to laugh or fire me or throw me out of the room. When she did none of those things, I said, “What if all the people acting out of character are hosts for the fungus—the same one that infected Paul and your granddaughter and, presumably, all of those uneducated people suddenly doing mental gymnastics for reporters? What if, instead of just making them smarter, it was influencing them? Making them care about things they otherwise wouldn’t, like protecting the Amazon? Which, by the way, is where the fungus lives.” She was still looking at me without expression, so I rolled on, hoping to convince her. “Apparently fungi do this kind of thing all the time. They influence other species, manipulating them in whatever way improves their own survival. Paul’s told me about single organisms stretching for acres underground, infecting trees and controlling where and how they grow, manipulating whole ecosystems to be perfect for fungal habitation.”
“Controlling trees is a long way from influencing world politics.”
“They control animals, too. Sometimes just subtly, pushing them to prefer certain food or habitat choices that improve the survival opportunities for the host. There’s a fungus that can completely take control of the brains of ants, forcing them to climb up high and hang onto a leaf, until the fruiting bodies grow out of their heads and burst, dispersing spores over the rainforest. During the time it’s taking root inside the ant, however, it benefits it, fighting off diseases or other infections that might threaten it.”
“So you think this fungus is intelligent. That it’s intentionally controlling thousands of humans to improve its own survival.” I had to give her credit; she said it with a straight face.
“It wouldn’t have to be aware of what it’s doing,” I said. “It could just be following its evolutionary programming. Say it alters serotonin levels in response to intentions that could help or harm it, which makes people feel good about one option and not about another. It could influence people that way without any higher-level brain function of its own. But I’m just guessing here.”
I realized I hadn’t told Melody about my father’s miraculous reversal. There had been no chance to do so, since my plane had left just after I found out myself. It reminded me, too, that I hadn’t yet called home. My parents had to be worried sick about me. Not just my mom, but my dad, too.
Had I been too hard on Paul? Dad’s healing was something extraordinary. If Dad had known such a thing was possible a few years earlier, he would have paid any price for it, taken any risk. Maybe I should have congratulated Paul instead of scolding him. On the other hand, what if the fungus really was the key to all this? Was my father’s mind now infected by a creature that could bend whole nations to its purposes?
“I need to call home,” I said. “No one there knows I’m safe, and I’m worried about my father.”
Melody let out a long breath, and I realized she was tired. “By all means,” she said. “And keep thinking about your idea. Think how we could verify it, one way or another. Ask your brother, too—it would be nice to have a mycologist’s opinion on whether such a thing is possible.”
I remembered my brother in his lab, giddy about the mycelia entwined through his neural pathways, saying, “There are certain portions of my brain they’ve remapped…”
“If such a thing is possible,” I said, “I’m not sure we could rely on my brother to tell us the truth about it.”
I finally found a phone in a municipal office that someone said I could use. I dialed and reached my mother’s cell phone number. “Hello?” she said. She sounded anxious and breathless, as if she had run for the phone.