The Andromeda Evolution

by Michael Crichton

  Strapped down tight for hours, the scientists were surprised as their bodies lifted from the platform. They’d become nearly weightless over the course of the journey. The threat of falling had been large in their minds for the first few minutes of ascent, but now Earth was a small orb far below, and the fear of falling had been replaced by a fear of simply floating away into the infinite night.

  “We need a way in,” Vedala said over the radio. “Our oxygen and heat aren’t going to last forever.”

  Feeling his boots pressing lightly into the platform’s grating, Stone realized he wasn’t completely weightless. The ISS was still ascending, generating a faint acceleration that simulated gravity. Falling off the platform was truly a risk. One slip, and they’d plummet into infinity—a slow death by asphyxiation.

  Stone looked over to see Vedala inspecting their makeshift dock. The exterior illumination around her visor glimmered, wreathing her face in a ghostly light. Her eyes had settled on the remains of the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module directly above them.

  “The Robonaut is missing,” noted Stone.

  “The lab module is completely infected,” said Vedala, over the radio. “It’s probably been absorbed into the mass. We certainly can’t go in that way.”

  “Then how do we get inside?” asked Stone.

  “I don’t know,” said Vedala. “But I think I know someone who does.”

  Vedala reached out and tapped Stone on his chest with her gloved fingers. Confused, he peered down at her hand. A brilliant dot of green laser light was dancing over her padded glove.

  Thirty yards away, the face of Jin Hamanaka was barely visible through a small hatch window of the Russian MRM1 module, attached to the Zarya. Despite everything, she was smiling with a mixture of joy and relief. Seeing the state of the climber, she had realized immediately the newcomers couldn’t be Kline’s allies. Aiming carefully, she pointed the green dot upward, to a gleaming silver cylinder.

  The Quest airlock module.

  Mated with the starboard port of the Unity node, the airlock was above them, oriented parallel to the planet’s surface. The stubby cylinder was flared at the end, where an airlock hatch was placed for American astronauts to enter and exit during routine EVAs.

  “Bingo,” said Vedala, giving a thumbs-up to Hamanaka.

  “Right behind you,” said Stone, as Vedala began to pull herself up the climbing platform. Grip by grip, the two made their laborious way along the side of the climber, taking care not to touch the ribbon itself. At the top of it, they stopped to rest beside the rollers. The rest of the way up was blocked by the infected Wildfire module.

  But the Leonardo module was a small leap away, attached vertically to the Unity node near the middle of the station. It was a jump they’d have to make to avoid touching the infected remains of the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module above.

  “Slow,” warned Stone. “The ISS is accelerating. If we fall, it’s a hell of a long way down.”

  Vedala nodded. “Be sure to tether as soon as you make the jump. Think of this as mountain climbing. No mistakes.”

  Neither scientist had experience moving in low gravity, but neither had any choice. Fortunately, the extreme safety-mindedness of NASA meant that the exterior of the station was littered with convenient grab bars. And the tether hooks were expressly designed to clip on to these safe harbors during routine EVAs.

  “Here we go,” Vedala said, tensing to leap.

  With a sharp hop, she launched herself across the flat blackness of space. The surface of the Wildfire module passed by just above her head. Turning without much control, she flailed an arm, her glove swinging dangerously close to the infected surface.

  “Watch out!” cried Stone into his helmet radio.

  Falling in a short arc, Vedala collided awkwardly with the silver Leonardo module. Scrabbling with both hands, she slid helplessly down the featureless metal exterior. Finally, she managed to break her fall against an external antenna array. She took a few ragged breaths before turning and waving Stone onward.

  “Piece of cake,” she said.

  Stone crept to the edge of the climber, keeping his arms away from the Wildfire module overhead. He tried not to look at the purple-tinged stripes of material. As he leaped, he imagined he could almost feel the infection radiating off its contaminated surface.

  Landing hard just above Vedala, Stone clung to the module with his fingertips. Reaching up, he took hold of a golden EVA handrail mounted securely to the white fabric-covered main truss. The aluminum alloy infrastructure was designed as a highway, and it was studded with plenty of dog-bone handholds, named for their distinct shape. Hanging on tightly, Stone and Vedala stopped to breathe for a moment.

  The moment wouldn’t last long.

  Vedala was the first to spot the white flash of the Canadarm2 robotic arm, just over Stone’s shoulder, as it accelerated toward them like a felled tree. Curled against the trusswork of the ISS, the fifty-foot-long, seven-jointed arm had silently begun to move. Without a word, Vedala yanked Stone down with all her might. As she did, the metal arm smashed into the strutwork where he had been resting. A wrenching scream echoed throughout the ISS as the powerful arm dragged across the trusswork, leaving crumpled metal in its wake.

  “It’s Kline,” gasped Vedala. “She’s controlling it.”

  The long clumsy arm dragged itself back up, spraying bits of metal and flakes of paint. It was in a default configuration, with only a flat plate of metal attached to the end. Recovered from the strike, the arm reoriented toward Vedala.

  But Stone was falling toward Earth.

  Flailing, he dragged his gloved fingertips down the side of the Leonardo module. The antenna array that had caught Vedala crumpled under his feet. Rolling down the side of the module, Stone lashed out with one hand and caught hold of the remains of the antenna. It came away in his grasp, broken. Then he jerked to a stop. A single thin wire still tethered the dislodged antenna to the module, like a tenuously clinging root. Panting, his feet dangling over the glowing planet below, Stone looked up toward Vedala.

  “Nidhi,” he managed to grunt. “Move!”

  Vedala threw herself to the side as the multijointed robotic arm came streaking toward her. Having already taken care of Stone, it was now trying to sweep Vedala off the strutwork.

  As she backpedaled, the robotic arm caught Vedala across the chest.

  The collision bruised Vedala’s rib cage, but she managed to grab hold, clinging to the robotic arm as it dragged her off the structure.

  Through a spray of spinning bits of wreckage, Stone could see as Vedala was shaken like a rag doll. He pulled himself up inch by inch, careful not to snap the narrow wire. Finally, he clasped fingers around the bottom lip of the Leonardo module. With a decent grip, he could begin climbing. The entire space station shook as the long white arm bucked back and forth, trying to fling away Vedala’s small form.

  “Hold tight, Nidhi. I’m coming to get you.”

  Reaching the top of the module, Stone shoved one arm through dented trusswork. He paused, racking his mind for an idea. Blue-white light from his helmet LED strafed the metal around him, revealing nothing useful. As a roboticist, he had realized that Sophie Kline had total mastery over the largely automated ISS. She would be capable of assuming control over almost any subsystem.

  But Stone hadn’t counted on the robot arm—the possibility had simply never entered his head. The hulking boom was designed to help dock multiton cargo modules as they arrived. Kline would have stripped the motor limit safeguards from it, of course. Controlling such a huge device was normally a slow process, requiring delicate control and a great vantage point—

  The robot arm had no touch sensors of its own, Stone realized.

  The machine could only be controlled by sight, which required cameras. But he saw no cameras mounted to the scarred length of the robotic arm.

  “James!” shouted Vedala, desperation in her voice.

  The arm had stopped shak
ing. It was now accelerating with purpose toward the infected mass of the Wildfire module. If she couldn’t shake Vedala off, Kline was planning to crush her, pressing her body into the pulsing infection that streaked across the module’s surface.

  With a quick glance around, Stone found what he was looking for.

  Launching himself wildly along the strutwork, Stone soared toward the golden squares of a solar panel. He grabbed awkwardly with heavily gloved hands. The flexible black and golden material bent and then crumpled, bits of black glass spraying away in slow motion. Ignoring the mess, Stone held on until his momentum was absorbed.

  Then Stone climbed the trusswork, not stopping until he could see his own reflection in the black eye of a large pan-tilt camera.

  Below him, Vedala was desperately trying to escape from the arm. The boom continued to swing across empty space, leaving a choice between suffocating in free fall or being eaten alive by the microparticle.

  Reaching with his whole body, Stone managed to grasp the head of the camera and rip it off its mooring.

  The last sight Kline registered through her camera feed was Stone’s mirrored visor. Then the video failed as he bashed the camera against the side of the ISS.

  Stone couldn’t find any more cameras mounted within view. Below him, he saw the robot arm slowing down, confused, with Vedala still hanging on.

  “I think she’s blind,” Stone reported over the radio. “You have to let go.”

  “Roger that.”

  Silhouetted against the face of the planet, Vedala’s small figure released the robot arm. Stone held his breath as her body spun slowly in space. She had executed the dismount perfectly, albeit slowly, soaring on a lazy trajectory toward the dark cylinder of the Progress cargo module. The narrow Russian module was mounted vertically at the rear of the station, sprouting two solar panels like dragonfly wings. Underneath, its engine was still spewing gas as it pushed the ISS upward.

  Vedala collided with the Progress, scrabbling her fingers against the matte black fabric surface. Blind, the arm had continued on its collision course with the Wildfire module. It silently plowed into the infected surface, sending a disturbing tremor through the entire ISS. Vedala cried out, grabbing at the solar panel mounts. Dangling from the Progress module with one arm looped over a panel, she kicked her legs as bursts of jet propulsion erupted from the module’s engines, inches from her boots.

  “Climb, Nidhi. Meet me at the airlock,” urged Stone. “You can do it.”

  Lunging, Vedala got a hand around a window porthole and was able to pull her entire body up in the low gravity. Moving slowly and warily, she managed to ascend the module.

  The robotic arm continued to sweep back and forth in a blind rage. Kline was now groping for them in the dark.

  But Vedala’s size worked to her advantage. Staying low, she crawled along the strutwork until she reached Stone at the airlock—out of reach of the sightless, groping appendage below.

  As she arrived, Stone reached out a gloved hand and pulled Vedala up. He leaned forward until their visors were touching. From this distance, they could see each other’s faces clearly. Both were flustered, breathing hard, their cheeks flushed with extreme overexertion.

  “Great work, Dr. Vedala,” said Stone.

  “Thank you, Dr. Stone,” she replied. “It’s a shame we haven’t even gotten started yet.”

  Vedala turned to the airlock, examining the controls before activating the depress pump. Stone continued to scan the area for any new danger. He had learned the hard way that Kline was both devious and intelligent. Working together, the two were finally able to push the hatch open to reveal the cramped crew airlock inside.

  In their elation, neither scientist noticed that the airlock was empty of the myriad items usually stored inside while it was not needed. If they had, they would have realized that it had been used by someone, and recently.

  Stone’s Theory

  YANKING OPEN THE EQUIPMENT AIRLOCK DOOR AFTER repressurizing, the scientists emerged into the Unity node—an American module serving as a kind of central hallway. The open space was dim and hazy, a few emergency lights blinking silently.

  The layout of the ISS had been greatly simplified by Kline’s takeover.

  An aft hatchway leading back to the Zvezda and the rest of the Russian portion of the station was locked shut with an improvised metal bar. Through a blur of smoke, they could see scarred metal and melted plastic. Below them, the deckside hatchway to the Leonardo module was also closed tightly—but not damaged.

  “There’s been a fire,” said Stone.

  “And it’s been put out,” said Vedala. “Or there’d be nothing left.”

  Their helmet-mounted lights strafed the darkness as the two floated to the center of the Unity node. Across from them to the port side, the Tranquility node was deserted, its cupola windows shuttered. Only one other passage remained, leading toward the front of the station—to the American-built Destiny laboratory and the modules beyond it.

  Stone tapped his helmet.

  “Let’s stay suited up,” he said. “Just to be safe.”

  Vedala nodded, wrapping her fingers around a blue handrail above the hatchway. For a moment, she simply rested there.

  The Destiny lab, primarily occupied by American and Canadian astronauts, was cluttered with dozens of inscrutable experiments. They had all been abandoned, the detritus floating eerily in the darkness. Exploring the gloomy space, they peeked beyond into the Harmony node but found nothing in it or the adjoining Japanese and European science labs.

  None of the computers or radio systems were functioning.

  Returning silently to the Unity node, Stone and Vedala shared a glance. Kline had to be located below them, in the Leonardo module. The module was located directly adjacent to the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory. Having seen the Leonardo module from the outside, they knew it was most at risk of infection.

  It was not clear whether Kline was aware of this fact or not.

  Stone and Vedala floated together before the round hatchway leading “down” into the Leonardo module. The dark glass of the hatch’s observation portal revealed nothing about the module beyond.

  It was time to face Sophie Kline.

  Using the chest-mounted display and control unit, Vedala and Stone each set their suit radios from local to stationwide. They listened for a moment, hearing nothing.

  “Dr. Kline?” radioed Vedala. “Are you there?”

  Stone noticed the soap-bubble lens of a camera placed above the hatchway. He studied it for a long moment, considering. Finally, he nodded to Vedala and took hold of the lever to open the hatch. It would open quickly, as it was impossible for Kline to lock the door from the inside without damaging it and trapping herself.

  As he laid his gloved hands on the lock bar, Stone heard a burst of static from the speaker inside his helmet. He paused, glancing at Vedala.

  From the look on her face he knew she had heard it, too.

  “Dr. Kline?” asked Vedala over the radio. “Can you hear me? This is Nidhi Vedala, head of the Wildfire field team and your direct superior. I am ordering you to stand down.”

  The helmet radio pulsed with a gentle ripple of laughter.

  In the background of the transmission, Stone caught a strange rustling sound. It evoked a mental image of desert sand, caught in the wind, rustling over endless dunes. He shuddered reflexively.

  A voice began to speak—the mildly slurred words of Dr. Sophie Kline, oddly intimate coming from inside the suit helmets.

  “Dr. Vedala and Dr. Stone,” said Kline. “Congratulations. You’ve just made history. The first human beings to ride a space elevator. The first of many.”

  “Enough, Sophie. Can you stop this?” asked Vedala. “Or is the chain reaction spreading out of your hands now?”

  “The question is not can I stop this, but do I want to? And the answer is no.”

  “Dr. Kline,” said Stone. “I understand your theory about the Andromeda Strain. You�
��re very smart, but you’re dead wrong.”

  For a moment, there was no response.

  “Let me tell you a story, Jamie,” replied Kline. “Once upon a time, there was a town called Piedmont. It was a small town, and the people there were good. They cared for each other. They raised families. But one day, a thing fell from the stars. On that day the good people of Piedmont died, their blood solidified in their veins. Or they killed themselves and each other. Drowned themselves. Shot themselves. Slit their own wrists. Did you know, Jamie, that some of those poor people even abandoned their own babies in their cribs to die?”

  Stone’s face had gone white behind his visor, eyes fixed on the hatchway. A muscle in his jaw was twitching as he gritted his teeth.

  “Nobody has called me Jamie since I was a little kid,” he said.

  “I’ve done my research on you,” replied Kline. “And I know . . . this thing that fell to Earth was a sophisticated tool, designed to evolve into many forms—all with a singular purpose: to find life and to keep it on the planetary surface, forever. The Andromeda Strain has lingered in our atmosphere for eons. It’s been found everywhere in our solar system, where it waits for life to develop. When we brought it down to Earth, it killed every living thing it touched. The blood of those people triggered the Andromeda Strain to evolve. It knows we’re here, and it’s trying to trap us.

  “It took fifty years, but one person learned to master the alien tools. Me.”

  Stone’s eyes were welling with tears. With effort, he swallowed and regained his composure. Then he began to speak quickly and with purpose.

  “Sophie, I am sorry, but you’re mistaken. The plastic-eating strain of Andromeda wasn’t a barrier to trap us. It was a test for intelligence. The goal of the Andromeda Strain isn’t just to detect life, but to detect intelligent life. You thought you were reverse engineering it, but you were taking a test. You passed, and now you’ve triggered something else . . . a new evolution.”