“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.