Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

The Sikorsky had already lifted off before Stone could get to his feet.

Boots on the Ground

DR. NIDHI VEDALA WAS ANGRY. AND IMPATIENT. SWATTING at a mosquito with one hand, she heard the thundering approach of the Sikorsky H-92 and her dark eyebrows knit together in a frown. The makeshift clearing around her was scattered with muddy black hard-case luggage, each containing precious equipment that needed to be checked for damage. The noise and commotion of incoming rotors sent squawking birds streaking past her and startled a young caiman on the riverbank into the water.

She ignored it all, consciously forcing herself to unclench her fists and continue inspecting the hard-cases. The jungle didn’t frighten her. Not much did.

Vedala had grown up an orphan in the Morarji Nagar slums of Mumbai, a member of the Dalit social caste—called the “untouchables,” often beaten and discriminated against. Though impoverished, she saw the world with the clear focus of a naturally keen intellect. Even as a bone-thin child under a mop of reddish-black hair, she never had a doubt that she would someday escape the narrow alleyways, fetid community toilets, and sickening miasma of the toxically polluted Mithi River.

During her first round of mandatory statewide merit testing, Nidhi had come away with the top score out of approximately fifteen million school-age Indian children. Starting from nothing, she had painstakingly earned her place among these distinguished scientists on this high-stakes mission.

The leader of the expedition and a founding member of the next generation Project Wildfire, Vedala had been dragged away from her laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by armed goons, driven an hour to Hanscom Air Force Base, and placed on board a wildly inappropriate C-130 Hercules military jet. Her mobile phone and laptop were confiscated, along with her identification. The cargo plane had been fueled up and waiting on the tarmac, but still set in an armored vehicle transport configuration, with only a few jump seats available for passengers.

None of this had startled her in the least.

Vedala was a small woman with an impish face and an efficient pixie haircut. She often scowled while concentrating, unconsciously intimidating others. She wasn’t tall, but nonetheless projected a large presence, and her military escort quickly decided to retire to the cockpit up front with the two pilots and loadmaster. For the next twelve hours Vedala sat alone in the cavernous belly of the great beast, sleeping occasionally, but mostly rereading a fat red packet of files by the stark glow of the interior floodlights.

From the first moment, she understood that only one type of threat could possibly justify this level of expenditure—it had to be a global crisis with existence-level repercussions. A true world-ending scenario.

And Vedala welcomed it.

This was, after all, exactly the situation to which she had devoted her career. A materials scientist with a nanostructure specialty, she had spent her public life rising meteorically through the ranks of academics.

Her relentless exploration of new metamaterials had exploited the quirks of quantum mechanics to miraculous effect. Among the many discoveries made in her laboratory were novel materials that could absorb electromagnetic energy to render a perfect retina-draining blackness, or allow light in the visible spectrum to slide away entirely in a blurry sort of invisibility cloak, or imbue a surface with perfect smoothness, a near-zero friction to which no viscous liquid could stick.*

But Vedala’s true career had not taken place in the public eye.

Early on she had been approached by a major general in the US Air Force, an ambitious former fighter pilot named Rand L. Stern who had transitioned to a faculty position at the US Military Academy at West Point with a specialization in theoretical mathematics.

At that time in her life, Vedala hadn’t known that academics and the military could mix. But the determined general wouldn’t be ignored. He told Nidhi that her expertise was needed for a historically momentous project, and all she had to do was sign on the dotted line. He mentioned she had already passed every background check and intelligence test that his analysts could administer.

Vedala had only blinked at this information.

She had not been aware that she was under any scrutiny. Now, she wondered at just how specific the New York Times crosswords had been getting the last few weeks, and she began to question the increasingly complex problems her graduate students had been bringing to their office visits.

In any case, Vedala had never failed a test in her life.

Choosing to accept Stern’s offer of military clearance, she had listened intently to every detail of the incident in Piedmont, Arizona. When it was over, she understood her role perfectly.

At first assumed to be an organism, the Andromeda Strain actually seemed to have more in common with a new area of science—nanotechnology, the study of machines less than one hundred nanometers in size.

Vedala had devoted her career to understanding the topography of nanoscopic structures, and the construction of artifacts small enough to fit on a pinhead (along with however many angels wished to dance there). She knew there was vast potential waiting for humankind in the realm of nanoscale. After a single conversation with Stern, it became her life’s work to understand this mysterious extraterrestrial microparticle.

So far, her studies had been a resounding success.

Vedala’s most brilliant insight had been to expose the two varieties of Andromeda to each other. Studying the results at a nanoscale, she discovered that each strain ignored the presence of the other. As close cousins, the substances seemed to have entered into a kind of noncompete agreement.

Essentially, AS-1 and AS-2 were invisible to each other.

Realizing this, Vedala had been able to mass-produce a spray coating with a nanostructure mimicking the contours of both Andromeda strains, creating a surface that was nonreactive to both. Vedala’s brilliance did not extend to naming her creation, however; the antibonding mechanism was dubbed simply “aerosolized nanocrystalline cellulose-based Andromeda inhibitor.”

The inhibitor had been utilized so far to protect low-orbit spy satellites and government rocket launches from atmospheric AS-2. This represented humankind’s first mastery over the strange, plastic-eating microparticle after decades of highly classified study in the laboratory. Now the time had come for Vedala to test her creation face-to-face against the first documented “wild” appearance of Andromeda. And she did not intend to fail.

It was nearly noon. Every other member of her team had already arrived, whisked away from their respective lives to the middle of the Amazon jungle.

All of them had been on time, except for one: James Stone, PhD.

As a roboticist, Stone’s skills were not mission appropriate. In Vedala’s estimation, he should have been replaced with a microbiologist or a bacteriologist. Any number of more multidimensional researchers would be better suited. And yet General Stern had been intransigent on Stone’s inclusion.

Standing beside a muddy river with no name, Vedala knew the stakes of this mission. She also knew its legacy. And thus she had her own idea of why James Stone had been forced onto her roster.

As Stone gathered his luggage, Vedala spit on the ground, turned, and walked away to inspect the hard-cases.

Vedala was an orphan and a self-made success. Her assumption was that James Stone, son of the famous scientist Jeremy Stone, had been included on her field team for a reason she could fundamentally never respect—his family pedigree.