The Nirvana Plague (12 page)

One of the men at the table sat forward. “Wait a second.”

Marley glanced at the speaker’s image on his screen. The uninspired name of “Fred Peters” hovered over his head.

Peters was a much-published research neurologist and a specialist in organic brain disease. In his late fifties, he was a bit older than most of the group. His voice had a harsh, sharp tone. His left hand was frozen into a stiff gesture suggestive of a crab’s claw, which he flourished like a conductor’s baton as he spoke. He had a number of other nervous tics and mannerisms. Even when he wasn’t talking, some part of him was always in motion.

“I don’t see how Dr. Marley’s work is relevant. In fact, I don’t see any justification for supposing this so-called outbreak is anything other than garden-variety stress-reaction.”

Seated beside Peters, a younger man smiled broadly, looking round the table. “Dr. Peters,” he explained, “has appointed himself the official skeptic of the group.” John Sikora was a Defense Department bioterrorism specialist. Marley found his presence in the group puzzling, if not absurd. Did Benford really think IDD could be a biological weapon? Sikora had a round, open face, blond hair and freckles, an athletic build, and a constantly changing smile. He looked more like a prep school politician than a bioweaponery expert.

Benford responded to Peters in a measured tone: “As you know, Dr. Peters, the purpose of this group is to investigate that very question, so let’s—”

“That’s my point, colonel. Let’s not jump right to figuring out the diagnostic criteria before we’ve established there’s anything wrong with the patient. If we can’t demonstrate with reasonable scientific certainty that these cases are not simple stress trauma reactions, then there’s no justification for going any further. The case for IDD just hasn’t been made. It’s a statistical anomaly.”

Marley could see that Benford didn’t like being interrupted. And she didn’t want to waste more time going through this debate again.

“All right,” she said. “Then how do you account for the fact that half a dozen COs scattered over half the planet have suddenly started reporting cases of battle stress reaction different from the typical presentations they’re all familiar with, yet strikingly similar to each other? And remember that these COs aren’t even aware of one another’s reports.”

“Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. This is the 21
^st
century. Everybody communicates with everybody.”

DiGrandi interjected: “We’ve reviewed their communications records. We know who they’ve been in touch with, and they haven’t been talking to each other.”

DiGrandi was a Defense Intelligence contractor. He was the youngest person in the room. Either he hadn’t shaved in a week or this was his idea of a beard. Good-looking, slightly built, and dark. And he was obviously very bright — sharp, quick eyes, and no hesitation when he spoke. There hadn’t been much about him in the dossiers. Marley scrawled a note on his tablet.
DiGrandi — access to surveillance material.

Peters answered impatiently:

“Yes, yes. But you don’t know who they gossip with in the real world, the non-electronic world, and what they gossip about. You don’t know whether any of those non-electronic contacts are corresponding with any of the other COs. You don’t know how much this idea is just ‘in the air.’ Rumors run through ground units even faster than the clap.”

He waved his stiff hand in the air suggesting invisible infectious fads might be swarming through the room like pixie dust.

“Each degree of separation between any two officers increases the domain of your analysis by another order of magnitude. You could never track all that down.”

DiGrandi was unimpressed. “I think you’re being pretty farfetched.”

Marley broke in: “What’s farfetched is the notion that four different enemies have suddenly deployed a spooky new neurological agent on six different battlefields and one psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Is there any CIA intel supporting that idea?”

DiGrandi dismissed him: “I’m not with the CIA. Anyway, that’s just one of many possible explanations. It’s not necessarily the most probable one.”

Peters nailed DiGrandi with a finger. “
Now
you’re talking sense! What
is
the most probable explanation? We should take that as our presumptive answer and test the observable facts against it. That
is
the scientific method after all.”

Marley said, “The trick is to know which explanation is the most probable.”

“It’s the one that assumes the least spooky stuff—” Peters said.

“—All right,” Benford said. “We’ll come back to this. First, let’s review what we think we do know.”

She turned to Lieutenant Tyminski, sitting behind her. “Dave, do you have Dr. Lang’s epi graph? Put that up, please.”

Tyminski’s hands flicked over his tablet. Seconds later the walls around them came to life and lit up with a graphic two meters wide.

“This is Dr. Lang’s latest plot. Anything you’d like to point out, doctor?”

Lang, like Mr. Wenslau sitting beside her, was from the CDC. They’d flown up from Atlanta especially for this assignment. Her expertise was infectious disease, of course. But she looked more like a librarian than an infectious disease fighter. Short cropped hair, light complexion, square face. In a skirt and blouse, she was, like Marley, out of uniform.

Wenslau had the look of a wise crow: sharp, portly, dark, a little tattered round the edges. In the dossiers his area had been given as “logistics, command, and control.” He was the guy who knew what was possible and how to get it done.

Lang sat up straighter. “Yes, well, let’s see,” she said in a singsong voice. “The trend line is a third order polynomial. As you can see—”

She stopped. She was pointing at the wall display, and suddenly found herself aiming at a red spot.

“Active track,” Benford said. “Feature of the
leaf.
”

She pointed at the wall herself and a blue spot appeared and followed the aim of her finger. A little tag with Benford’s name on it followed the spot as it roamed over the wall.

“How’s it know you’re pointing?” Lang said.

“Virtual modeling algorithm,” Wenslau muttered.

Lang smiled without humor. “NIH gets all the best toys.”

Benford put them back on course: “You were saying? About the trendline?”

Lang folded her finger in and resumed: “Yes, well, as you can see from the chart, the cases logged in the past few days have really swung that line upwards. Previous to this week, the case counts were so few and so irregular that it was questionable whether there was really any progressive trend there. I think it’s less questionable now.”

Peters eyed the wall display critically. “But that assumes the chart actually measures something. There’s no diagnostic criteria. So there’s no way to know how accurate the counts on your chart are.”

Benford turned on him impatiently: “Two minutes ago you objected we can’t discuss diagnostic criteria until we know there’s a disease to describe. Now you’re objecting that we can’t assume there’s a disease until we’ve described it.”

“You tell me, colonel, how you decided what to count on this chart.”

“We’re going by the seat of our pants. You’ve seen the tapes and read the reports too. Gut reaction is the best I’ve got at this point. That’s why I want to talk about diagnostic criteria. That’s why Dr. Marley is here. He’s got the nearest thing to a diagnostic instrument we have.”

“I’m just saying that at best we don’t know what we’re charting, and at worst we’re charting an illusion. The counts on your chart just assume that Marley’s cases and the military cases are the same thing.”

“That’s the presumptive theory we’re operating under.”

“I think that’s a problem. The incidence rate on that chart is so low that the standard error of measurement is very high. If you throw out five cases, that changes the sample significantly. And if even one or two of the military cases are incorrect, it invalidates your trend even more.”

“Actually,” Marley said, “there are probably more than five civilian cases.”

Lang and Benford both said, “There are?”

“Yes. I’ve received correspondence from doctors at two other psychiatric hospitals who saw my paper and think they may have some cases.”

“What makes them think so?” Benford said.

“Similar indications, of course.”

Benford was clearly annoyed. “Where are they?”

“One in Houston, one in San Francisco.”

“Forward those messages to me, please.”

It wasn’t a request.

Lang raised her hand, like she wanted to be called on.

“Disease outbreaks are often unmistakable,” she said, her lilting voice singing the opening notes of an instructional lecture. “Sixteen people spend the night vomiting after eating roast pork at the company picnic. That’s easy to spot. But often the outbreak is not so obvious. When we have a suspicion, we must assume the suspicion is well-founded and react accordingly. If we don’t, people are going to get sick that wouldn’t have if we had acted more aggressively.”

It wasn’t clear to Marley whether this was meant for him or for Peters, but Peters took it as his.

“I understand that, Dr. Lang,” he replied. “I just don’t buy that the cases Dr. Marley reported on have anything to do with the military cases. The similarity between them is dubious. And the similarity between the individual battlefield cases is probably due to the similarities of the affected subjects — age, training, environment, etc.”

Benford flattened a hand on the table, signaling her turn to argue. “All right, Dr. Peters. Here’s the thing. These subjects don’t look like your typical battlefield stress reaction. They just don’t. I’ve met these men and women. There was just something different there. And that was Dr. Marley’s feeling about his patients. You’ve seen those tapes. So has Dr. Marley.”

Peters waved her off stiffly. “Dr. Marley’s paper rightly calls IDD ‘
pseudo
-infectious’. For the simple reason that there was no credible biological vector. We’ve all seen how ideas catch on and become fads. Fifty years ago everybody was schizophrenic. It was the hottest thing going. Thirty years ago everybody was depressed, and doctors were handing out mood stabilizers like popsicles at a parade. After that everybody who was anybody was bipolar. And in the military, it’s even worse. Every little war has its own mysterious malady. Every soldier somehow knows the symptoms. Now I’m not saying these cases are malingerers. But you know, you’re up there on the line, you’re scared shitless all day every day, you’re sleep-deprived, hungry, exhausted, you feel like dog puke all the time. You know it’s not a
normal
way to feel, so you look for an explanation. Everybody you know knows somebody who came down with some weird non-specific brain disease and got pulled off the line. You feel kind of like that.
You
feel non-specifically weird! Maybe
you
have it! Our brains, the crowning glory of evolution by natural selection, were created
by
our bodies to
keep
our bodies alive — to recognize danger at a distance, both spatial and temporal, and avoid it if at all possible. It’s no surprise then that you wake up in your bunker one morning, or inside your tank, and you’re not yourself anymore. You’ve got
it,
whatever
it
is. But
it
doesn’t have to be an organic disease. It’s an
idea
disease.”

Next to Marley, Delacourt shook her head doubtfully — her fine dark hair bobbed and flashed with light. “The infectious memes metaphor has been out of favor for decades, Dr. Peters,” she said. “I don’t know if it ever really was in favor. Cute idea, but in the final analysis, scientifically meaningless.”

“I’m talking about fashions, fads, crazes. Memes or no memes, you do believe in the reality of fads, don’t you?”

“I’ve talked with these people,” Benford said. “They’re not just playing a role.”

“But, the thing is,
you
have got the idea too. You see what you expect to see. This is one of the central insights in the cognitive science field. We see what we expect to see. The brain actively filters awareness. We can’t help it. It’s how we’re wired. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Delacourt?”

Delacourt nodded slightly and smiled. “Yes, Dr. Peters, I agree. But that doesn’t mean IDD isn’t real.”

She gave a Marley a conspiratorial glance. Keep the faith.

Minute by minute, Benford was losing the battle to conceal her impatience. “We’re here, Dr. Peters,” she said, “because we have good reason to believe that IDD
is
real.”

Peters shook his head stubbornly. “We’re here because the boss didn’t like the other conclusion. But the secretary’s political instincts aren’t any measure of truth.”

Sikora laughed again. “Well, there’s truth, and then there’s
truth
.”

Peters continued the attack: “Look, the reason the politicians didn’t understand the finding of the Pentagon’s commission is that they can’t let go of their cognitivist paradigm. They’re committed to the belief that we think what we choose to think and that we do what we think to do. But what neurologists and cognitive researchers — like myself and Dr. Delacourt here — what we know is that that idea is unscientific. It’s contradictory to everything we’ve learned about how the mind really works. It’s a romantic holdover from the metaphysics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What the politicians don’t understand is that these folks aren’t
consciously
enacting this syndrome. Their brain is doing what it needs to do to keep them alive, and letting them believe what they need to believe. They aren’t malingering cowards any more than the typical psychiatric patient is willfully psychotic.”