With a micro-pipetting frame and one of Rosie’s carefully maintained population of Sprague Dawley rats, he is able to stimulate measurable brain activity with low concentrations of each of these fungal proteins. The results are consistent, predictable and repeatable.
The mycoproteins are neurotransmitters, running the brain’s errands for it in the absence of the regular staff. Cordyceps is doing good deeds by stealth. Its mere presence messes up the chemical balance of the brain, which is why so many of those native neurotransmitters have dried up, but now it is repairing that imbalance with its own exquisite forgeries.
The mass of fungus in the brain has turned itself into a protein factory. It is manufacturing copies of the missing neurotransmitters in the form of long-chain mycoproteins built to order. The fake, fungal neurotransmitters seem perfectly capable of doing the job the real ones would have done, carrying nerve messages from the human brain tissue to the peripheral nervous system. To the rest of the body. This is the main trick in the Cordyceps repertoire, of course. But in every other hungry he has examined—every hungry ever documented—the result is a hostile takeover. The fungus hijacks the host.
In this boy, Cordyceps was filling in the gaps in brain function caused by its own presence. Building bridges instead of torching buildings. It was helping the brain to think, not tripping it up and hog-tying it.
Greaves feels as though his head is splitting open, not with pain but with the chain reaction of thought on thought on thought. This is a find that vindicates the entire expedition, but it’s so much more than that. It’s—
What?
The Holy Grail.
The philosopher’s stone.
The elixir vitae.
The cure.
If he figures out how to fake it. How to make an uninfected brain do whatever this brain is doing and turn the fungal invader into a friend and fellow traveller. A symbiont.
When the pressure in his head gets to be too much, Greaves sits down quickly on the floor of the lab and hides his face in his hands.
He can do it. He knows he can.
He can make a vaccine.
One by one, he defines the procedural obstacles in his mind and considers how they might be addressed. This will have to be a live vaccine, not even attenuated. And it will be heterotypic, including not just cells from the pathogen but also cells from this child’s spectacularly modified brain. Embed the symbiotic tissue like a seed crystal, to teach a normal human brain how to welcome the invader. How to collaborate instead of resisting.
But there are thousands of human brains in Beacon. The task will be huge. He calculates the volume of serum that would be required.
And how it might be obtained.
Five minutes later, he is still sitting in the same position. Still paralysed by the implications of what he is about to do.
32
They’re moving again, back down across the plateau on a roughly south-westerly vector. Foss is up in the turret, and wishing very hard that she was somewhere else.
All through the day she has been seeing things. Flicks of movement in the furze, the long grass, behind the occasional rock ridge or up on the elbow of a messy tumble of scree. Nothing odd about that, of course. There are plenty of things out there that might be moving. But it doesn’t feel quite random enough: it feels like every time she doesn’t quite see something, it’s the identical something she didn’t quite see last time. There is some trick of tone or colour or velocity that makes her scalp prickle with déjà vu.
It’s just paranoia. It has to be. Living in a tank will do that to you. Any kind of enclosed space, for that matter. The horizon is too close, and it never moves. Then when you get up in the turret and take a look outside, any movement you do see gets exaggerated. It takes a while to push past that, to get your eye in again.
But it shouldn’t take all bloody day.
The afternoon is petering out into tardy, sullen evening. Rosie seems to empathise, slowing more or less to human walking speed. She will be stopping soon, since driving cross-country at night on unknown terrain is outside even Sixsmith’s skill set.
The sky starts to put its sunset colours on, which is a fine thing to see and distracts Foss from her growing obsession for all of five minutes. But the rapidly cooling air gives her an opportunity to try something new. She takes out the UV glasses. Toggled to N-NORMAL, they are maximally receptive in the 22–33 degrees Celsius range and at distances of less than 100 metres. On that setting, they show Rosie as more or less alone in the endless night. There are a few yellow-green blurs at ground level where small nocturnal mammals are hunting and being hunted. The rest is cold, passive blue.
Foss is prepared to buy that, but there is one more thing she can do to see what the night has up its sleeve.
She resets the goggles to E-ENHANCED. In this mode, she can access the headset’s processing software and tweak the resolution to focus on a specific temperature range.
She goes low. Then lower. Then right to the bottom of the gauge.
And Jesus Christ almighty, the little bastards are everywhere.
“What are we talking about?” Fournier asks for about the tenth time. “What exactly are we talking about? Give me facts, Private, not conjecture.”
Well, I wasn’t a private when I signed up for this job, Foss reflects, and I’m sure as hell not a private now, so clearly you can’t have been talking to me. Accordingly she addresses herself to the colonel and to McQueen.
They’re all jammed into the crew quarters, elbow to elbow, so there’s no need for her to raise her voice. Everybody is right up in everybody else’s face except for the Robot, who has flattened himself against the latrine door out of pure holy terror of someone accidentally touching him.
“These things are in the blue,” she says. “Cold-passive. Shaped like people, but if they were people they’d be dead. They don’t show up at all unless you dial the contrast all the way up, and even then they’re so close to background you pretty much only see them when they move. I’d put their core temperature around 13 Celsius.”
She speaks slowly and clearly. Part of her wants to yell and wave and point, but this is her first official debriefing in her new role and rank and she wants to do it right. Plus, it’s not as if they’re going anywhere. They are dug in for the night now, having lost what was left of the light ten or twenty minutes ago. Bad timing, but it’s not as though Foss could have done what she just did any earlier in the day.
“That temperature reading is spot-on for hungries,” Sealey says. Foss is grateful. Someone had to play the straight man here.
“Yeah, but the movement isn’t,” she says. “They were jogging along on either side of us, keeping pace with Rosie but not closing. And they were in formation. Like a kind of a wedge on either side, with one pacemaker and then a bunch of them strung out along a widening line. Does any of that sound like hungries to you?”