“Most of the computers in the building are probably clean,” I said.
“Yeah, but they’ve got a team of guys pulling them apart and putting them back together again before they let anyone use them.”
“So what have you got?” I asked Andrew.
He tapped a key. “Traced your brother’s phone call, for one thing.”
“Really? Where is he?”
“Deep in the Amazon, my friend. Jungle central.”
“Seriously? He’s in Brazil?”
“Right about… here.” Andrew turned a globe on his screen and clicked, zooming down first on South America and then quickly into the heart of northern Brazil. The screen showed an unbroken expanse of green trees as seen from above. The view was similar to what I had seen previously from the top secret version of Google Earth I had worked on with Melody. But the interface and controls looked different. On the left panel, I saw a long list of terrain overlay options that I recognized as top secret code words designating specific intelligence assets.
“What is this?” I asked. “I haven’t seen this before.”
“This is Esri’s version,” he said. “Works pretty much the same way as Google’s.”
“Why are there two?”
“Actually, there are at least half a dozen,” Andrew said. “Built by different contractors at different times for different program offices. Google has one, Esri has one, General Electric has one. I think Lockheed Martin has three. They all do more or less the same thing, but they don’t all interface with the same set of sensor platforms.”
“Sounds inconvenient,” I said. “Why don’t they consolidate them into one? Or better yet, why didn’t we just buy one of them to begin with?”
Shaunessy laughed. “Welcome to big government spending.”
“I didn’t show you this to discuss our software acquisition policy, though,” Andrew said. “Take a look.” I looked at his screen again. Nothing but trees.
“Right?” Andrew said. “No cleared land, no villages, no roads, no airstrips, no nothing. Not even an illegal logging camp. It’s deep in the Maici River valley, but it’s not even close to the river. Your brother is giving new meaning to the phrase ‘out in the middle of nowhere.’”
“How accurate was your trace?”
“Are you kidding me?” Andrew said. “Who do you think you’re working for, the state police? I could drop a bomb within a meter of where he was standing when he picked up the sat phone.”
“Sat phone? That’s how he made the call?”
“Well, they’re not exactly running fiber optics out to where he’s at. There’s more, though. Here’s what it looks like in infrared.”
Andrew switched to a different overlay, and the screen showed a nearly monochrome green, stippled with patterns of a slightly darker green. “Looks like nothing to me,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Nothing. No hidden factories, nothing that produces any kind of heat signature above the normal forest level. Even if there was something deep underground, we’d pick it up. There’s nothing.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why are you expecting to see anything? My brother’s lived out in the rainforest before. It doesn’t mean there’s some secret Ligados base out there, does it? If it looks like miles of trees, it’s probably just miles of trees.”
“I would agree with you,” Andrew said. “Except for this.”
He minimized the globe program and brought up a video. I recognized it as drone footage, taken by the camera of a Reaper or similar UAV while in flight. It flew low over an ocean of treetops. A text readout on the top left portion of the video gave the drone’s latitude, longitude, and altitude. It was only a few tenths of a degree from the location where Andrew had tracked my brother, meaning it was within a few miles of his location.
It was flying north. On the left edge of the video, I could just see an orange glint of light from the setting sun. The sky was darkening, and much of the forest below was in shadow. We watched but nothing happened. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” I asked.
“Wait for it,” Andrew said.
I waited. The drone shifted slightly toward the northeast, putting the sun out of its direct view. The picture darkened further. And then I saw it. Right on the horizon, a glow, as if a town lay just out of sight and its electric lights illuminated the sky. But there was no town. There was nothing, not for hundreds of miles.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” he said. “But this was the last ten minutes of video this drone produced before it went dark. We never saw or heard from it again.”
“The moon?” I suggested. “Was the moon about to rise over the horizon and that’s the glow we see?”
Andrew shook his head. “Already checked. The moon was nowhere near that position.”
“Then what could be making it? You already told me there’s no heat signature there. Nothing industrial that could produce that kind of light.”
“That,” Andrew said, “is the million-dollar question.”
Eventually Melody returned, grumbling about the unreasonableness of directors in general and Ronstadt in particular.
“You’ve got two hours,” she told Shaunessy. “Then Ronstadt’s going to shut down all the servers and get in there with a cleaning crew. He can’t stand the idea of the fungus being in there, even if we can get some advantage from it.”
Shaunessy slammed a fist down on the folding table her computer sat on. It was the most violent outburst I’d ever seen from her. “This is our one connection to the fungus! The best opportunity we’ve ever had to influence it or feed it misinformation. How can he shut it down?”
“He’s afraid those spores will get out and his whole workforce will be infected.”
“If we don’t do something soon, the whole world will be infected.”
“It’s not like when Kilpatrick was in charge. Ronstadt doesn’t listen to me.” Melody looked at me. “Also, I tried to get an audience with the president, to communicate our concerns with using a version of the fungus to fight the fungus. My request was denied. Ronstadt assured me that my objections would be passed on. But I know what that means.”
“It means they’re keeping the president in the dark?” Shaunessy asked.
“Possibly,” Melody said. “But more likely it means the president knows exactly what General Barron plans to do with McCarrick’s discovery, and he approves.”
“So we’ve got nothing,” I said.
Melody raised her hands in an expressive shrug. “We’re not beaten yet,” she said. “Don’t give up. We’ll keep doing whatever we can to find ways to stop this thing.”
The others kept talking, but I stopped listening. It was out of our hands now. Barring a miracle, by the time the week was out we’d all either be nuked into our constituent atoms to make way for the fungus to dominate the Earth, or else we’d be the zombie slaves of whatever human was pulling our strings. Mind control would be part of humanity’s future, whether from the fungus or from ourselves. It made me feel very tired.
I kept thinking about the phone call from my brother. He had known, somehow, that I was there in the server room, despite the fact that he had called from Brazil. It implied that the fungal network was more connected than we had surmised. Where Paul was, he had no electronic infrastructure, and yet input from the server room—possibly even a security camera feed—had somehow reached him.
“Come and see me,” he had said. In the depths of the rainforest? It was ludicrous. The infection had in some ways made him so smart, and yet in other ways he was disconnected from reality. He seemed to expect everyone else in the world to enthusiastically accept a fungal parasite in their brains, and to be surprised when they didn’t.