The Andromeda Evolution

by Michael Crichton

  Turning in circles, Peng looked at the field team, eyes wide over the blunt nose of her respirator. “She’s tried to kill us once already. She’s going to try again. I’m calling for an evacuation. Now.”

  Vedala put her palms up, trying to calm Peng. “That’s not possible. She’s in orbit. You need to remain—”

  At that moment, the shattered turbine began to try to restart itself.

  The burned wreck had shut down automatically after the first, accidental explosion. Now, its safeguards appeared to have been remotely overridden. A disturbing shudder ran through the floor.

  “Goodbye, team,” said the soft voice, already lost in a static crack of lightning as electricity surged into the broken turbine engine mount, instantly vaporizing the remains of the rotor assembly.

  A plume of billowing black smoke shot up from the husk.

  “Respirators tight!” shouted Vedala, backing up toward the pile of rucksacks ringing the open hatchway. Odhiambo, Stone, and Tupa joined her. Knocked to her knees by the tremor, Peng swiveled her head desperately.

  “Come on, Peng!” urged Vedala.

  Standing up on shaky legs, Peng focused on the room’s most obvious exit with a soldier’s instinct. The only sure way out was across the cavernous room, beyond the dense smoke spewing up from the screaming remains of the turbine. It would be tight, but Peng was confident she could make it in time. If someone was going to escape to stage a rescue—or a body recovery—it would have to be her.

  Escape was the only winning move.

  “No!” ordered Vedala, kicking her backpack into the open hatchway. “Everyone after me!”

  Voice muffled by his respirator, Odhiambo shouted, “Into the hatch!”

  The plume of smoke had risen up into a foreboding column, smothering several loitering canary drones. Peng began to skirt around the obsidian cloud. After the initial shock wave had passed, the floor had turned spongy and soft.

  Stone and Tupa launched themselves down the metal ladder and into the unknown. Older and slower, Odhiambo followed suit with surprising dexterity. Vedala was close behind, stopping only to scan for Peng.

  She had stepped farther away.

  The pillar of toxic dust was collapsing. It began to sweep across the room toward them. Peng’s gaze was still fixed on the exit.

  “Don’t!” shouted Vedala.

  Hands flat, Peng Wu launched herself into a sprint, legs slicing through knee-deep smoke. After a few lurching steps, her respirator slipped off her face and bounced around her neck. She continued accelerating in a beeline toward the tunnel exit, lips pursing as she tried to hold her breath.

  “Damnit,” muttered Vedala. She stepped lower into the shaft, only her eyes above the floor now. Her fingers were clamped tightly around the cold metal ladder. A rolling tide of smoke was churning toward her. Odhiambo’s discarded light sticks glowed a bruised neon green within the black clouds, like ethereal lightning engulfed in a storm.

  Peng tripped and fell.

  Stumbling back up, she blindly groped her way forward. Then she collapsed into the blackness again, and disappeared.

  Vedala took hold of the hatch over her head and paused another instant. She couldn’t take her eyes from the spot where Peng had fallen. Under the spinning LEDs of disoriented canaries, Vedala thought she had seen movement.

  Then a terrible sight lurched into view.

  Peng’s body reappeared, standing and falling again, then crawling. The infection had moved quickly, clearly penetrating her mucous membranes and propagating in her lungs. Incredibly, she took a choking breath, and managed to release a wailing scream of agony.

  The tumbling wave of dust grew in Vedala’s vision, and she slammed the hatchway shut as the toxic cloud rolled over its top.

  THOUGH STILL FUNCTIONING, the power plant had been turned into a shrieking storm of poisonous ash. Every inch of the room was choked with gritty black smoke. The subterranean power station was now an abyssal hell, echoing with the screaming of torn metal as the damaged turbine quaked and rocked. The faint lights of disoriented canary drones streaked through the air, their cameras still transmitting.

  Below them, Peng Wu was alive.

  She would have felt the Andromeda infection closing her airways, like sandpaper on the back of her throat, but she was still crawling. Her knees and forearms were leaving faint indentations in the softening floor, and her clothing had dissolved into her skin, seemingly painlessly. Peng looked very tired, and she seemed to want nothing more than to lay her face on the floor and drift away to sleep.

  But a glimmer of light from above caught her attention. And just before she collapsed for the last time, Peng managed to turn over onto her back. She gazed upward, her hair already fusing into the anomaly in tendrils of black on black.

  Overhead, a white light was shining in the storm of ash.

  It grew closer and brighter. She could detect a faint thrumming sound, and a gentle hot wind blew over her face as the angelic beacon descended. At last she saw that it was a canary drone, encrusted with metallic growths and spinning off-balance. Twisting in the air, it plummeted down and landed right beside her face.

  And in her final moments, Peng remembered her mission.

  In a ragged voice, she turned her head and began to shout to the canary. She kept speaking as the infection closed up her throat and blocked her veins. She spoke as her body sank into the pillowy folds of the anomaly. Peng licked her metal-flecked lips, and she shared a last confession.

  “The Andromeda Strain,” she rasped, “. . . it’s everywhere. Every planetary body. Mars. Moon rocks. Asteroids.”

  Huddled safely in the sealed hatchway tunnel, the remaining field team listened to Stone’s monitor as it relayed this final message. In the darkness, nobody could see the tears leaking from Vedala’s eyes and tracing cool paths around her respirator. Stone kept an arm tight around Tupa’s bony shoulders. Odhiambo’s eyes were closed, head bowed as if he were praying.

  “We covered it up, NASA, JAXA, CING,” said Peng, through clenched teeth. “Kline was right. Andromeda isn’t here by accident. It was sent. Waiting for life. And it’s been searching for such a long time . . .”

  State of Emergency

  SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1998, THE INTERNATIONAL Space Station has existed as a symbol of peace and scientific cooperation between the world’s most powerful nations. Though these so-called superpowers often have conflicting interests, a sense of fellowship has prevailed among the many inhabitants of the ISS over the years. Astronauts form a common family, citizens of humanity working together above a shared world, men and women chosen from among the top scientists and pilots in the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, Korea, the European Union, and a dozen other countries.

  That unspoken integrity—an ideal maintained for over two decades with unbroken ceremony and courtesy on board the ever-expanding space station—was about to be shattered.

  Dr. Sophie Kline was declaring war.

  The decision-making process that led to Kline’s next action has been much discussed. Most scholars have come to believe that the ISS was assembled in an era of relative naïveté, based on handshake agreements with no true safeguards. It is theorized that such an age of cooperation between superpowers will never again be possible, given the social, political, and intellectual climate that exists today.

  Research and interviews, however, have led to a more optimistic conclusion.

  What happened was most likely the work of a rogue scientist with unique traits. Kline’s rise to success was unlikely, to say the least, given her severe disability. It was those years of suffering that forged her into something almost superhuman—a person who simply could not be broken, or stopped.

  At the heart of Kline’s indomitable spirit was a deep anger.

  Kline despised the constant obstacles in her life—from the boundaries of her own body to the limits of scientific progress, and even the intellectual restraints erected by the scientific community to safeguard the hu
man race.

  Though laudable, her lifetime of achievements had not been spurred by a positive desire to open up new frontiers of knowledge. Rather, they were a sort of revenge. Kline had mastered the sciences quickly, violently, and with the express intent of putting them to use—the way one might break a horse in order to ride it.

  Best estimates indicate that three years prior, Kline had become convinced that the Andromeda Strain was an attack on humanity. The tragedy is that Kline’s secret actions from that point on had gone unnoticed or unchallenged due to her prestige status as an American astronaut.

  Compartmentalized knowledge is a mainstay of spycraft and necessary for any governmental information dissemination process. As a result of a lack of information transparency, however, Sophie Kline and Peng Wu were the only active members of the Project Wildfire field team who knew the truth about the Andromeda Strain.

  The original AS-1 variety had been collected by the Scoop satellite missions from Earth’s upper atmosphere. Subsequently, the strain had been detected on every rocky body planet in the inner solar system. Traces of it had been recovered in 10 percent of regolith samples brought back by the Apollo trips to the moon.* And despite an unexplained landing failure of the return mechanism, the Stardust mission to Comet Wild 2 tested positive for the microparticle.

  These instances had been humankind’s only sample-return missions, though other spacecraft had carried specialized instruments for remote detection.

  Most recently, the Hayabusa Japanese probe had made landfall on the tumbling, cigar-shaped asteroid BR-3. While it was there, an obscure sensor called Andro returned a seemingly innocuous reading, tagged onto the end of a larger report. The result was meaningful only to a small handful of researchers and military personnel.

  Andromeda had proliferated across our solar system.

  The scientists on the original Project Wildfire had been correct to invoke the Messenger Theory, first proposed by John R. Samuels in the spring of 1962. Simply put, the best way to find life in a mostly empty galaxy would be to send out a probe that could make copies of itself on arrival, and then spread those copies to other stars in an act of exponential exploration.

  Kline had studied every aspect of the microparticle. She knew it thrived in hard vacuum, lasting for countless millennia and self-replicating without producing waste. It lacked amino acids, meaning no proteins, no enzymes or any of the “building blocks of life,” and it was housed in a nonbiological crystalline cell structure.

  Finally, she had come to a conclusion.

  The Andromeda Strain wasn’t a microorganism. It wasn’t alive, exactly. The extraterrestrial microparticle was in fact a highly complex machine.

  Kline reasoned that AS-1 had been a probe, designed to travel to other star systems and then make copies of itself and wait. For the last several hundred thousand years it had done just that. What it had been waiting for was triggered on February 8, 1967, in a small home on the outskirts of Piedmont, Arizona. On that day, a town doctor named Alan Benedict made the foolhardy decision to open the hatch of a salvaged Scoop VII satellite.

  The Andromeda Strain had been waiting for life.

  AS-1 infected living organisms, triggering an evolution into the AS-2 plastiphage configuration, which escaped from the depths of Project Wildfire and propagated in the atmosphere, dissolving the advanced plastics needed to reach low Earth orbit.

  It had detected life, and then evolved into an insidious barrier.

  And it is this conclusion that helps explain Kline’s motivation. She saw the Andromeda Strain as yet another unfair obstacle among a lifetime of them. She believed the microparticle was designed with hostile intent—to detect life and then keep it from reaching planetary orbit. It was a wall, preventing our species from achieving its rightful destiny among the stars.

  She would have considered it a personal affront.

  Kline wondered how many other alien species had been trapped. Privately, she speculated that this was the solution to the Fermi paradox, which asks, given the billions of Earth-like planets in the universe, Where is everyone?

  Imprisoned on their home worlds by Andromeda, Kline assumed.

  Humankind’s first contact with an alien intelligence had not been a friendly affair. It had been a preemptive act of war.

  And Sophie Kline was now preparing a counterattack. She had studied her adversary and painstakingly determined how to manipulate the microparticle into new configurations during her work in the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory. Her plan was to use Andromeda against itself, to destroy the obstacle it posed to human expansion into space, once and for all.

  Kline had repositioned her remote manipulation station inside the Leonardo Permanent Multipurpose Module and closed the hatchway. Her hands were wrapped in teleoperation gloves and her head-mounted display was tight over her eyes as she took mental control of the R3A4 humanoid robot. The brain-computer interface to the station allowed her to send commands at the speed of thought.

  The safeguards necessary to run a BSL-5 laboratory module on an inhabited space station called for emergency root access over the low- and high-level control infrastructure of the entire sprawling structure—an unprecedented level of backchannel command.

  At UTC 17:24:11 a containment breach emergency was declared from inside the lab module. Like dominoes falling, every ISS subsystem, including communication, propulsion, and life support, relinquished its control. And as simply as that, Sophie Kline had seized total authority over the International Space Station.

  Following standard emergency procedure, Kline’s two crewmates made their way into the Zvezda service module. A cornerstone of the early station construction, the Zvezda was self-sustaining and outfitted with both Russian and American computer systems. A Soyuz crew return vehicle was docked on the module’s aft port.

  Kline had already moved to block all outgoing radio transmissions, sever connection to ground control,* and disable the onboard Wi-Fi. She then sealed the common berthing mechanisms (CBMs) in the Unity node connecting to the Zarya and Zvezda modules, effectively trapping the two other astronauts. And finally, she set all life support to backup power and cut the interior lights to conserve energy.

  The SEP thrusters activated, converting electrical power collected by the solar panel array into continuous upward force. A shiver went through the entire structure, and a high-pitched whine could be heard. Objects in free fall, including the astronauts themselves, began to lower toward the deckside surface as the ISS rapidly gained altitude.

  Yanking her head-mounted display up onto her forehead, Kline delivered a pronouncement over the station-wide closed-circuit camera to her two fellow astronauts in the Zvezda module.

  “This is Dr. Sophie Kline. I am declaring an emergency and seizing station resources. From this moment until the emergency is over, you are to remain confined to your current module. Do not attempt to make outside contact. Do not attempt to leave your module. You will receive more information as needed. But for the time being, the International Space Station is on lockdown.”

  The surprised faces of Yury Komarov and Jin Hamanaka oriented to the camera. Kline cut the feed, leaving only a black screen and stunned silence.

  Of course, Kline’s crewmates immediately set about defying her orders. They found the CBM passageway jammed from the outside, all communications equipment disabled, and electricity distribution cut to essential levels. Because life support connections are run along the outside skin of the station, regardless of whether the interior hatchways are open or closed, the astronauts remained safe inside their module, with plenty of air, food, water, and facilities for elimination.

  What they were not in possession of was the ability to leave, or to easily communicate with the outside world. Thinking quickly, Jin Hamanaka retrieved a high-power laser diode from an optics experiment that had been stowed for return in the Soyuz. The class 3B diode was emerald green and powerful, though not classified as hazardous. Hamanaka was able to shine the battery-powered
laser light through one of the small round windows of the Zvezda module toward the surface of the planet below.

  At any given moment, an estimated several hundred amateur astronomers are watching the International Space Station as it passes overhead, visible from between two to six minutes. Now orbiting on a new axis, the ISS had attracted a flurry of attention from this small international community of “station gazers.”

  As it swept across the globe at 17,500 miles per hour, the ISS generated a rippling wave of surprise. A handful of attentive astronomers in Central America, Southern Europe, and the Middle East were bewildered to see the ISS cruising along without its exterior lights.

  They all saw a bright green dot flashing in the belly window of the Zvezda module. Of those handful, more than half were familiar with the nautical language of Morse code. Of those, all were able to recognize the most famous message of all.

  S O S

  . . .– – – . . .

  The Tunnel

  MAJOR PENG WU EXPIRED AT UTC 18:58:06, APPROXIMATELY a half mile into the anomaly, infected by an aerosolized variety of the AS-3 microparticle. Nidhi Vedala was shedding silent tears at the bottom of the hatchway ladder. But a spark of anger was also growing in her chest.

  Vedala could still see Peng Wu’s final moments in her mind’s eye—the woman’s smooth, unperturbed face etched by a latticework of infinitely fine metallic hexagons. Peng’s agonized shriek had sent a shudder of revulsion and grief through Vedala. Now, she focused on the cold steel of the ladder biting into her hip and tried to slow her breathing.

  The glare of her headlamp was bright in the claustrophobic shaft. She was dismayed to see the beam swallowed almost totally by the relentlessly uniform material of the anomaly. Around her, she saw the faces of Stone, Odhiambo, and the boy Tupa, all staring in concern.

  Their unmasked fear reminded Vedala abruptly that she was still the leader of this expedition—and that their mission was far from over. In many ways, she thought, the true mission had only just begun. A confident, if weary, authority returned to her voice.