“Or which nation’s leaders,” I said.
She shot me a questioning look, but I didn’t explain. That part of the story would come out soon enough.
“What I mean,” Mei-lin said, “is that a fungal organism isn’t so much the matter it’s made of as much as its genetic instruction set. Whether it’s living in the soil of the Amazon or a human parietal lobe, it’s the same set of instructions, evolved for a single purpose.”
“What purpose?” I asked. “What’s it trying to do?”
She pressed a button on her keychain, and a silver BMW chirped, its taillights flashing. “That’s easy,” she said. I walked around to the passenger side and climbed in as she did the same on the driver’s side. Before starting the car, she swiveled to look me in the eye. “Its purpose is the same as every other organism. To survive.”
I chewed on that while she pressed the ignition button, starting the engine with a healthy roar. She checked her mirrors and backed smoothly out of the parking space.
“There’s a reason fungi are so successful,” she said. “Did you know fungi outnumber plants six to one? They can survive anywhere. You can kill ninety-nine percent of one, and it’ll still survive. They don’t even need light. Fungi have been found thriving in highly radioactive places like reactor cooling tanks, the ruins of Chernobyl, and the rubber window seals of the International Space Station. They’re not just radioresistant; they actually benefit from ionizing radiation. Fungal hyphae grow toward radioactive sources the way plants grow toward sunlight. During past eras when animals and plants died out due to high radiation, fungi grew and thrived. When we finally find life on other planets, there’s a good chance it’ll be a fungus.”
“So, this particular one,” I said. “Just how intelligent is it?”
She pulled out of the parking garage and stopped. “Hang on a sec,” she said. “Which way am I driving?”
I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m following you.”
“Well, where are you staying?”
“At my dad’s house, I guess.” I told her which direction to go.
“So, intelligence,” she said. “It’s a tough question to answer. We talk about intelligence as a measure of a creature’s ability to solve problems—can it use tools, can it communicate abstractions, etc. This thing can obviously achieve some pretty complex behaviors. Its goal, however, is pretty straightforward. Reproduce. Spread out. Survive.
“Your real question, however, is whether it can think like us. Is it making plans, is it aware of us, is it aware of itself? And I can’t answer that. But there’s nothing in what it’s doing that can’t be explained by the perpetuation of a behavior that conveys a survival advantage. In fact, its behavior isn’t all that different from what thousands of species have been doing for millennia.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ants and termites are famous for how organized they are, how they have different jobs, cross rivers, build large structures. But a queen doesn’t give orders to the other ants. There’s no central leadership. Each ant follows its own evolutionary programming in a scheme that works for the survival of all. Birds flock, bees swarm, lobsters march, fish school—it’s the emergent behavior of thousands of individuals acting on their own. A colony of ants isn’t an intelligent entity, but it can make complex decisions, even solve geometric problems.”
We drove in silence for a while. I tried to think through everything she said, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t trust my brain to think clearly. Finally, I said, “So did you tell all this stuff to my brother and father?”
“You bet I did. Your brother told me he already knew, and that it was under control. That the meds I gave him before were doing the trick. I advised him to come in for a follow-up, but he declined.”
“He wasn’t taking the meds,” I said. “And he knew exactly what the fungus was doing to him. He wanted it in his mind. Welcomed it. And my father… well, of course he welcomed it. What else could he think?”
She blew out a breath that was half appreciative whistle and shook her head. “That was something amazing,” she said. “I didn’t know your father from before the change, but I read his charts. I could hardly believe I was dealing with the right patient. Alzheimer’s just doesn’t go into remission like that.”
“Remission? You think it’ll come back?”
She shrugged. “How could I predict something like that? Alzheimer’s does irreparable damage to the synapses. It’s not supposed to go away to begin with.”
“That’s what’s so hard to work out,” I said. “This thing obviously provides value to its hosts. It makes them smarter. It even cures Alzheimer’s. So is it a parasite or a symbiote? Does it survive to our harm or to our benefit?”
Her smile was fierce. “I guess that depends on what you define as a benefit.”
She pulled into the driveway of my father’s house, crunching gravel under the tires. There were no other cars there, and the house was dark. I had been hoping I might find my mom home, but now that it came down to it, I was relieved not to find her. I wanted to find my dad, but I was also reaching the edge of my ability to stay awake. If I didn’t get a good night’s sleep and get it soon, I wasn’t going to be useful to anyone.
“So,” Mei-lin said. “What should we do?”
My attention swam. “What?”
“Do. What should we do? You’re NSA. You’ve got to have contacts, people who will listen to you. We need dozens of researchers working on this, taking it apart, finding a cure. We need to take this public.”
I chuckled. “That’s not exactly where the NSA shines.”
“But you know people, right? If we come at this from two directions, maybe we can make some headway.”
I hadn’t yet told her about what was happening in Brazil or our suspicion that the fungus was redrawing the political landscape of South America and turning soldiers against their own countrymen. “Look,” I said. “I’ve barely slept in three days. Any way we can reconvene this in the morning?”
Her expression remained serious. “I’ll be here first thing tomorrow. I don’t think we have much time to waste.”
“First thing tomorrow,” I said.
I hauled myself out of the car, found the key under the mat on the back stoop, and let myself inside.
I felt my way through the dark house until I found the light switch and flicked it on. The house was just as it had been before I left, comfortably cluttered and full of memories of my father. Fishing photos and knickknacks covered the tops of bookshelves and end tables. Throw pillows lay piled on the couch, along with a ludicrous stuffed trout I had given him as a joke years before. Photos of Paul, Julia, and I as children. Scrabble and chess sets on the dining room table.
Had he really walked away and left all this behind? Was he ever planning to come back? The fact that he had left Mom no way to contact him made it seem more sinister than a simple vacation. He owned an iPhone, but I doubted he had it with him. It was probably in a drawer in the house somewhere.
The thought reminded me that I needed to buy a new phone. I had left my old one in my luggage in my hotel in Brasília, which meant that it was now in the hands of the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, and thus the property of the Ligados. I couldn’t imagine it would do them any good, but it was certainly annoying to me not to have it.
I traipsed upstairs toward my bedroom, turning lights off behind me as I went. It was creepy to walk around in an empty house at night, even one as familiar to me as this one. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder or leave the lights on, though the normal creakings and tickings of the old house sounded unnaturally loud. I wondered if I had locked the doors, though I knew I had. I had even kept the key in my pocket instead of returning it to the mat outside.