The Consciousness Plague by Paul Levinson

Author:Paul Levinson [Levinson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765307545
Google: RE0-FFmNvJ0C
Amazon: B00FEYVELG
Barnesnoble: B00FEYVELG
Goodreads: 18586447
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LUNCH AT THE Hyatt was in a skylit atrium. For the second time in under twenty-four hours, I sat across a table from Darius Morton. The view this time was not as good—lily pads in the water that bordered and crisscrossed the dining area—but it was still quite nice for an indoor arrangement. And the conversation promised to be a lot better.

I presented my story, my theories, as best I could to Morton … about an antibiotic that jumped the blood-brain barrier and attacked some unknown bacteria or bacteria-like microorganisms in the corpus callosum that helped enable our consciousness … about memory loss being the current result… about how I needed some evidence, any evidence, that this might have happened in history … about the Phoenicians and the alphabet and what they and the world might have forgotten about their presence in North America … about how Morton was the expert in this history, and I needed his help, any help, that he could provide, lest Omnin be gobbled up like popcorn this fall with who knew what consequences…. I even told him a little bit about the Riverside stranglings, just in case he had any ideas about their possible connection to Omnin and the memory loss.

He took it all in, with his Caesar salad and his iced tea. He nodded. “I believe it all,” he said when I was finished. “It’s happened to me.”

“You’ve had memory lapses?”

“Oh, of course,” Morton replied. “I attributed them to my advanced age—ninety-two, you know.”

“But you took Omnin?”

“Of course I did,” he said. “And I would again. At my age, I can afford to lose a little memory—I have plenty to spare in this old head.” He touched his temple, and chuckled. “But I can’t afford to get too sick, or even stay a little sick for too long. You see what happened to McNair.”

“But it makes sense to you that the Omnin might have caused your memory loss?” I could see again, right across the table, the problem that Andy had been wrestling with since this whole memory mess had begun. There were too many other reasons for memory loss. They were more plausible than Omnin as the culprit. In Morton’s case, it was just old-fashioned old age.

“Yes, what you’re saying makes sense,” he said. “The Phoenicians were ravaged by disease. All people in those days were. That’s why life expectancy back then was so short. But they probably built up a bit of resistance to some diseases—traveling to so many different areas, being exposed to a bit of this here, a bit of that there, like a series of booster shots. Probably earlier peoples went through this as well—any wide-ranging nomadic existence would do it. So yes, such civilizations on the move, such bands of roaming people, might have had just a little more time to come up with cures, antidotes, anything that might work against those illnesses. They might well have used what we would today call antibiotics. They could have developed them on their own, or picked them up at some learned port of call.

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