“Okay,” she said. “Let’s regroup.”
“Peng?” asked Stone. “Is there any chance she—”
He stopped when he saw Vedala’s face. Instead of saying more, he reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The group stood close together in the mouth of another unlit tunnel. Like the previous tunnel, this one also appeared to slice a straight line into the darkness. The only difference was that this corridor was half as large, only six feet tall and as wide as a typical hallway. The glassy walls seemed to press in on them. The tunnel was altogether featureless, save for a round metallic conduit pipe running along one side, transmitting electricity to something deeper inside.
The one remaining canary had not detected airborne toxins, and the field team had their respirators around their necks, speaking in whispers by the drone’s guttering light. Odhiambo passed out MREs, which they each chewed mechanically as they conversed. Tupa ate a granola bar and listened intently to the translations provided by the drone. Vedala had noted that the boy was absentmindedly holding Stone’s hand. It looked as though the contact was comforting to both the man and the child.
“Peng said the Andromeda Strain has been found throughout the solar system, but the results were covered up,” said Vedala. “First of all, could that even be true?”
Odhiambo’s hand went to his chin.
“I believe so. There have been only a handful of successful sample-return missions: the moon, a comet called Wild 2, and the Itokawa asteroid. Every other nonterrestrial sample came from naturally occurring meteorites.”
“Don’t forget the upper-atmosphere missions that started all this fifty years ago,” added Stone.
“And the Scoop missions, of course,” said Odhiambo. “But access to so few samples is tightly controlled. It would be possible to suppress knowledge of the discovery of Andromeda in moon regolith, for instance. And if nonreturn probes were instrumented to look for it, the presence of Andromeda could easily be hidden during the data transfer process.”
“In other words, you believe her,” said Vedala.
“Of course I do,” said Odhiambo. “These were her final words, and they were costly. She was in a great deal of pain.”
“Then the Andromeda Strain satisfies the Messenger Theory,” concluded Stone. “It has spread everywhere, waiting for life to emerge. Meaning there must be an intelligence behind it.”
“Based on the Piedmont incident, likely a hostile intelligence,” said Vedala.
“No wonder Peng was panicked,” said Odhiambo. “With that knowledge, it was clear we were walking into extreme danger. A hostile alien structure.”
“She kept her secret until it was too late,” said Stone.
“She tried to warn us. I should have listened,” said Vedala. “We could have been more careful.”
“There are more immediate issues,” said Stone. “Kline is trying to kill us, and we’re buried a kilometer deep inside the Andromeda Strain.”
“She’s up there and we’re down here,” added Vedala, her jaw clenched. “Kline wants us dead, and we’re going to figure out why. For now, we only have one direction to go.”
Odhiambo was quiet for a long time before his eyes went back to the metal conduit running along the floor.
“I do not believe the location of this structure is an accident. It is perfectly equatorial, like the debris path of the Tiangong-1. But it is also located precisely at the mouth of a river that can provide hydroelectric power.”
“So you think the crash of the Tiangong-1 . . .”
“It was a deliberate obfuscation, a red herring, so to speak, provided by Sophie Kline to mask her true goals. For some reason, I believe she needed the ISS to be moved into an orbit over this area, and the Heavenly Palace hypothesis provided a way to make that happen.”
“Could that be true? Could Kline have really planned and built the entire anomaly from the ground up?” asked Vedala.
“As you said, the structure likely started as a speck of self-replicating material. Once she programmed its growth pattern, it would have been as simple as planting a seed in the dirt,” responded Odhiambo. “The rest could have been orchestrated using personal wealth and connections with private industry. She is one person I would never underestimate.”
“And yet we have no idea how much of this is on purpose, and how much is just a terrible mistake,” said Vedala.
“We know that she doesn’t want us here,” said Stone. “She surely knew the sertanistas would notice the anomaly, but they wouldn’t have the resources or knowledge to investigate properly. Wildfire protocol was only triggered when Eternal Vigilance detected outgassed particles matching the Piedmont incident. And that only happened due to an accidental turbine explosion. I think Kline’s true goal was to work here for a while in isolation, letting the anomaly grow in the deep jungle.”
“So these infections were not part of her plan,” said Vedala. “But whatever she’s doing or trying to do . . . it’s spinning out of her control. If this structure keeps spreading—or if some nation decides to drop a bomb on it—the AS-3 particle could end up consuming the entire world.”
“The infamous Scenario F,” mused Stone. “Total planetary extinction.”
The Kenyan xenogeologist placed a hand flat against the wall, then pulled it away. His palm was glistening with condensation. “This tunnel has taken us under the lake. Whatever is using this electricity . . . it’s hidden beneath the water.”
With that knowledge, a palpable burden seemed to close in on the team. Stone could imagine the weight of hundreds of tons of water pressing down, squeezing itself into the tiny droplets emerging from the gray-green walls.
Standing on his tippy toes, Tupa whispered to the hovering canary. The device rotated to watch him, and the boy made a quick gesture. In response, the drone rose to head height and oriented to James Stone.
In its robotic voice, the canary translated, “We go now.”
Glancing up the chute to the hatchway in alarm, Vedala was relieved to see that the seals were holding. None of the infected smoke had come in. She smelled only damp air and the metallic odor of the anomaly.
“We go now,” said Tupa in halting English. The boy gestured and whispered at the drone once more, with urgency.
“There is a roaring,” translated the canary.
“A roaring?” questioned Vedala, but Odhiambo hushed her. He closed his eyes, face aimed at the ceiling.
Listening.
“Water,” said Odhiambo. “Water is coming.”
Best-Laid Plans
DR. SOPHIE KLINE WAS NOT OVERLY TROUBLED BY what was occurring below. Though she knew full well the implications of her recent actions, her neural oscillations (measured constantly via the brain-computer interface) were once again concentrated between 8 and 12 Hz—an alpha state indicating a calm alertness.
The lives of her team members were no longer her concern.
Kline was minutes away from reaching a goal she had dreamed about for years. She had sacrificed family and personal relationships, devoting nearly every waking moment to reach this precise moment in time and (more importantly) space. And she had spent the day running a final experiment.
The ISS had continued accelerating, hour after hour, with nothing to slow it down. To the consternation of Mission Control, it had traveled over ten thousand miles beyond its normal orbit. It was much too late to stop now.
Even armed with hard data collected via brain-computer interface, the true mindset of an individual is impossible to fully reconstruct. Yet we are uniquely fortunate to have detailed records of Kline’s neural state during these final moments, before all contact was lost. These data were worth considering, at least, given what Kline was about to perpetrate.
In her studies at the University of Washington, the renowned forensic psychologist Dr. Rachel Pittman discovered a type of anticipatory focus associated with committed scientists—a pattern consistent with Kl
ine’s neural data. Pittman found that scientists tend to score very high on delay of gratification (DOG) indices, an expected outcome, since researchers must often wait for years before receiving a reward for their effort. Kline’s thought process at this juncture had shifted toward “anticipatory reward”—a mode in which the moral abhorrence of recent events seems insignificant compared to the scientific outcome.
The ability to delay reward—exhibiting supreme confidence in a hypothesis that has taken years to pay off—is what allowed Kline to achieve success, and it is what blinded her to the horror of her actions in these moments.
This is not meant to be an excuse, simply an explanation.
After seizing control of the International Space Station, Kline had spent an extra forty-five minutes retrieving and donning the Cardioflow, a pair of pressurized leggings designed to distribute blood from the lower body into the head. In microgravity, astronauts often report a “cloudy” feeling, as if they’ve been standing on their heads. These leggings were designed to squeeze blood up from the lower body to improve circulation, thinking, and comfort. If employed for too long, however, they could cause blackouts and, eventually, death.
The result, for the moment, was that as she completed her final experiments, Kline felt completely fresh and clearheaded, for the first time since she had arrived on board the ISS. In video footage, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright and alert. She was seen smiling as she flexed her hands in the sweaty telepresence gloves, orchestrating control of the R3A4.
Inside the windowless pod of the Wildfire laboratory module, the fabric-covered arms of the R3A4 were in constant motion. Details of what followed are strictly classified, but a partial recording of the experiment was recovered.
The robot’s work was being executed in a custom-built biological safety cabinet—an enclosure designed to limit exposure to biohazards while interacting with infectious agents. The sterilized robot had no need for gloves, much less the bulky blue positive-pressure suits and helmets employed by human researchers. The air within the laboratory module had been replaced with a nonreactive argon-nitrogen mix.
The cabinet was embedded in the wall, a well-lit cradle with a hood of glass allowing space beneath for the robot’s arms to operate. Inside, negative air pressure pulled air up through a HEPA filter to prevent particles from escaping the cradle and polluting other microgravity experiments.
Cameras mounted under the cabinet hood were meant to meticulously record every experimental trial. Working backward from this point in time, forensic videographers discovered missing tape going back several years—evidence that Kline had carried out (and covered up) a long series of illicit experiments. All told, over one hundred hours of experimentation were unaccounted for, most of them occurring in fifteen-minute segments.
Under the magnification built into its vision system, the R3A4 turned its gaze to a sample of AS-3, trapped under a flat glass slide. It had been created in secret by Kline herself, by modifying the existing samples discovered five decades before. The tiny six-sided microparticles had been arranged in a line. Scaling her hand movements to 1:50,000—approximately one micrometer per five centimeters—Kline used her unique mental interface to puppeteer the steady hands of the R3A4 through an experimental ballet that was breathtaking to behold.
In the form of a machine, all of Kline’s human vulnerability had been stripped away—she was now operating in a realm of perfect scientific experimentation. No human hands could ever manipulate an object at this scale and with this amount of grace. With confident swoops and dips of her robotic end effectors, she painted the line of Andromeda microparticles with a catalyst agent. Seconds later, she painted the same area with a growth substrate of liquid carbon dioxide.
The reaction was swift and mesmerizing.
Each microparticle of AS-3 began a version of the “mitosis” witnessed in larger scale on the anomaly. The sum total began to dance and skitter under the glass plate. Kline watched as the faint line began to grow in two dimensions, soon taking on the shape of a stamp.
Moving quickly—indeed, well beyond the limits of human ability—Kline applied a growth-inhibiting agent to the top and both sides of the expanding particles, curtailing their voracious spread. Even so, some of the particles along these faces began consuming a small portion of the experimental tray. In places, the ceramic surface crumbled into a gray, ashlike substance.
The R3A4 moved quickly, avoiding contact with the rapidly multiplying microparticles. Its ortho fabric-coated hands gleamed with a thick coating of Vedala’s inhibitor substance, applied during its construction to prevent reactions with either Andromeda strain.
A structure began to emerge on the macro scale—a ribbon shape, about as wide as a sheet of paper and thinner than a human hair. It continued to grow along its bottom edge only, like a scarf weaving itself longer and longer.
The ribbon soon expanded beyond the confines of its experimental tray. In a swift motion, the robot drew back an arm and rapped its knuckles across the face of the biological safety cabinet. On the second rap, the cover shattered into floating glass shards (all use of polymers had been curtailed, for obvious reasons).
At some point in the past, Kline had reset the force allowances on the robot’s actuators. Electric motors by their design can exert instant and crushing torque—making them more than capable of tearing themselves apart. As a result, these motors were limited by an acceleration profile coded into the software and monitored by three independent and redundant sensing systems. But disabling this acceleration profile would have been possible for an expert.
By removing the safety constraints, Kline had greatly multiplied the Robonaut’s ability to move in ways that could be both constructive and destructive.
Reaching through thick slivers of broken glass, the R3A4 pulled out the tray containing the metallic ribbon. It was now over a foot long and continuing to grow. The robot carried the ribbon to the crown of the Wildfire module—the overhead point at which the module was docked to the Harmony node, and from there attached to the entire International Space Station. It was a location chosen to complete the ruse that the laboratory was simply a cargo module.
The robot pressed the dormant end of the ribbon against the bare metal wall and painted it with another dab of accelerant.
In seconds, the AS-3 material seemed to sink into the module hull structure. The smooth wall near this mating point began to shimmer a familiar gray-green color. The materials were combining as the accelerant was consumed, the aluminum of the hull interlacing with the AS-3 microparticle. In a subsequent temporary chain reaction, metallic tendrils spread through the hull. The other end of the ribbon hovered weightlessly, growing longer, rippling like a swimming snake.
A shrill alarm began to whine.
Kline’s monitor flashed the following warning message:
* * *
ARGON LEVELS 10%, NITROGEN 22%, COMBINATORIAL GASES OVERCOMPENSATING—PLEASE REFILL CANISTER—CANISTER EMPTY—ALERT
* * *
The carefully balanced atmospheric levels inside the module—designed to be inert and nonreactive—were changing rapidly. The leading edge of the expanding ribbon was consuming the air itself. Sustained by a steady appetite of atmosphere, the ribbon kept growing as the infinitely adaptable microparticle searched for any available fuel to continue its self-replication.
Kline ignored the blaring alarm, and the sound soon faded to nothing as the atmosphere was further consumed.
The ribbon began to spit and twist, like a downed electrical wire. The leading edge brushed over the carapace of the R3A4. On contact, it sent up a roil of smoke that was itself consumed by the swiftly growing material. The inhibitor seemed to have prevented the ribbon from fusing with the robot’s fabric skin.
In any case, the machine did not react. There were no pain sensors built in for Sophie Kline to feel.
Instead, the machine’s black lenses were focused on a small point in the deckside hull. Pausing as if to take a
deep breath—an action that was actually occurring in the module occupied by Sophie Kline—the R3A4 flexed its multijointed legs and launched itself across the cylindrical module.
As it soared, the machine pulled back its fist. On contact with the far wall, it unleashed a punch with all the force it could muster. The servo motors in the punching wrist shattered on impact as its gold-anodized aluminum knuckles dented into solid hull. The blow wrenched several fingers into awkward angles, snapping beige-white Vectran tendons like moist cartilage, creating a grisly semblance to human injury.
Drawing back the mangled endoskeleton of its hand, the Robonaut punched the same spot again.
And again.
On the fourth blow, the hull of the Wildfire module breached. What little atmosphere still remained was explosively evacuated through the fist-size hole in the side of the module.
Designed to withstand depressurization events up to 15 PSI per second, the Robonaut was not harmed, although its bearings emitted tiny particles of lubricating grease as the air evacuated from them.
Ignoring its damaged hand, the machine eagerly leaned forward. Through the new hole, the R3A4 gazed upon the blue face of planet Earth, shining thousands of miles below.
Inundation
BASED ON INTERVIEWS AND DATA RECOVERED FROM the last canary drone, the flood began with a groaning that could be heard somewhere deep in the guts of the anomaly, growing into a rumbling bass that resonated everywhere. A wet-pavement aroma of moisture filled the air. By this time, a thin carpet of cold water had already swept past. Tupa was a dim shape in the distance, sprinting after the light of the lone surviving canary, his bare feet smacking the tunnel floor.
The field team looked at each other in dismay for a split second, headlamps illuminating a haze of water vapor rising into the air. Then, without speaking, they broke into a measured trot. Vedala led, with Stone and Odhiambo following in single file. With a swipe of his finger, Stone set the canary’s LED to full illumination. The tunnel ahead erupted in stark white light.
The Andromeda Evolution Page 19