I knew how hard it was to get a doctor on the phone, so I was surprised when, after only two intermediaries, Dr. Chu herself answered the phone. “Yes?” She sounded harried, overworked.
I froze. How to broach such a subject with a stranger? “Um… I’m calling about a patient you treated a few months ago? Paul Johns?”
“Yes!” Her tone of voice changed in an instant from peremptory to fully engaged. “Are you from the CDC? Did you read my report?”
“Um. No. I’m Paul’s brother, Neil Johns. I think you also treated my father.”
She swore softly under her breath. “What can I do for you, Mr. Johns?”
I thought quickly. It sounded like she might respond better to me in an official capacity than as a family member. I lowered my voice to a near whisper, concerned about what my fellow passengers might overhear. “I’m also an analyst with the NSA,” I said. “I’m afraid that my brother—along with possibly thousands of people in South America—have been infected by a fungus that is compromising their ability to make their own decisions.”
Silence on the other end. This was the point at which I either connected with her or she hung up politely and told the hospital answering service to block my calls.
“Where are you?” she said. “We need to meet.”
“I’m on an airplane landing at BWI in”—I checked the time—“half an hour.” I told her my flight number.
“I’ll meet you at the airport,” she said.
CHAPTER 21
With the time I had left before we started our descent, I called Shaunessy in São Paulo to get an update on the war. She couldn’t tell me much on an open line, but she confirmed that, after what had happened at São Luis, the command staff was now taking our claims seriously. Cardiff had ordered all senior officers to undergo PET scans, and crop dusters had risen to the top of Ground Theater Air Control’s surveillance watch list. I wondered what would happen once the media realized that the bombs that took so many American lives had been dropped by American planes. It couldn’t stay secret for very long.
Airplane flights had always wreaked havoc with the pressure in my inner ear, and by the time we landed, my head was throbbing. I opened my mouth wide and pulled at my ears in an attempt to relieve the pressure but without much effect. I was reaching the end of my strength. I’d been up all of the previous night getting rattled in the C-130J like nuts in a jar. The night before I’d caught only a few hours of sleep on the couch in Shaunessy’s hotel room, and the night before that, I’d slept in the CIA agents’ car on the drive from Brasília. I was running on fumes.
I almost didn’t recognize Dr. Chu when I saw her waiting for me at the exit from my gate. She was smaller than I remembered. The top of her head reached only to my collarbone, and her slight shoulders reminded me of a bird’s wing, fragile and delicate. The look in her eyes gave no hint of weakness, however, and I could see her striking fear into a class of interns. Give her a white lab coat and clipboard and the force of knowledge and authority, and I might quail before her, too.
“Doctor Chu,” I said. I shook her outstretched hand, and mine seemed clumsy wrapped around her slim, precise fingers.
“Call me Mei-lin, please,” she said.
We walked down the corridor away from the gate. I had no luggage—it had all been lost in Brasília—so there was nothing to wait for. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me,” I said.
Mei-lin gave a chuff of surprise that might have been a laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I’ve been shouting from the hills that this thing is dangerous, but nobody’s taking me seriously. Follow protocol, they say. Make your reports to the CDC and USAMRIID and let the professionals create a panic if a panic is warranted. What I saw in your brother’s cultures, though, has got me scared. Really scared.”
“Why? What did you see?”
“The filamentous morphology has some extraordinary qualities. It can hack the interfaces of other cells, feeding them chemical messages they would expect in their normal interactions with their neighbors. It’s like a con artist. It tricks the other cell into thinking it’s business as usual, snuggling up against it as if it had always been there. As far as the cell is concerned, the fungus is just another sensory transducer cell or autonomic neuron cell or any kind of cell. As far as I can tell, it’s a generalized capability. Put it with skin cells, it acts like a skin cell. Put it with thyroid gland cells, it acts like a thyroid gland cell.”
“It changes its DNA?” I asked.
“Oh, no. The mimicry is just at the interface level. On a genetic level, it’s still fungal mycelia, and it retains its essential connection to the rest of the mycelia.”
“So… does that mean you essentially have two brains functioning in your head?” I asked.
“Worse than that,” Mei-lin said, leading the way out of the main airport building. “It’s just one brain, with your original cells and the mycelial copycat cells working together seamlessly. The resulting network is even, apparently, more efficient than the original. But it comes at a cost. Some percentage of the brain is composed of fungal mycelia and thus operating for the ultimate good of the parasite, not the human host. Although those goals sometimes coincide.”
“But what does that mean, ‘for the good of the parasite’? For the good of the specific organism hanging out in your brain? Or for the whole fungal species?”
She turned a corner toward short-term parking, and I followed her. “I’m not sure ‘species’ is the right word.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cells I took from your brother and the ones from your father are genetically identical, as are the ones I’ve pulled from other patients.”
“Wait,” I said. “Other patients?”
“At least five others. The point is, there’s no genetic diversity. This isn’t so much a species as a single organism, spread out among different hosts.”
“I don’t understand. If they’re not connected, how can they be the same organism? Even if they’re genetically identical, they would be like twins, then, right? Not one individual.”
“That’s kind of a semantic distinction in this case,” she said. “There’s no centralization in a fungus like there is in a human. There’s no division of labor among its parts. I can slice a single fungus into a hundred pieces, and each piece will be just as much the original as any of the others. A fungus is kind of like the internet. It’s a network of nodes, each of which senses its environment and communicates that information along the network to the other nodes.”
I followed her between two rows of parked cars. “But, if a fungus is a network, what happens when it’s split up in different hosts? The network’s broken then, right? It’s not like it can communicate through the air. Right?”
“Well, it can’t chemically,” she said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t communicate at all.”
I thought of the Johurá tribesmen sending whistle language via cell network. “You mean through hosts talking to one another?”
Mei-lin shrugged. “When two people talk to each other, their brains pass information. There’s no reason to believe that infected brains wouldn’t incorporate that information into the larger network. A fungal network doesn’t think, but its structure is almost neuromorphic, even without a human host. It reacts in pretty sophisticated ways, coordinating all the available information and making collective decisions for its environment. Like which trees in a forest should thrive and which should die.”