Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Only now did Peng have enough information to turn to the group.

“The gray substance from the tongue has tested positive for Andromeda,” reported Peng. “I can’t confirm exactly which variety. The results are confused and most likely corrupted.”

“Even so, what did you find?” asked Vedala.

Peng spoke carefully. “The specimen appeared to coagulate blood on contact, like AS-1. But it also partially dechained polymer-made material, in the manner of AS-2. And . . . it seemed to self-replicate, using the substrate materials as fuel.”

Nidhi Vedala exhaled. “So at the very least, we know the primates were infected. The question is, by which strain?”

“Impossible to guess, without a full laboratory analysis,” said Peng.

Odhiambo spoke up in a steady, rumbling voice. “The trees are unbroken between here and the anomaly. There are no babies among these monkeys. The infants must have been left behind. And primates are capable of brachiating at over thirty miles an hour through dense canopy such as this.”

“We’re less than twenty miles from the anomaly,” added Vedala, grasping Odhiambo’s point. “At maximum speed, these animals survived a little more than half an hour, postinfection.”

“That’s consistent with the Piedmont incident,” said Stone. “Some victims there died immediately of blood coagulation, but others . . . they lasted longer. Long enough to record final messages, to wander the streets, and to commit suicide. None survived more than an hour.”

“Except the baby and the old man,” corrected Nidhi. “They each had an abnormal blood pH that prevented infection.”

“Right,” said Stone, his voice hollow.

“We should get these results up to Kline in the Wildfire module,” said Peng. “With living Andromeda samples for comparison, she can tell us which strain we’re dealing with. We need to find a clearing.”

“Wrong,” replied Brink, looming over the four scientists. He scanned the jungle as he spoke. “We need to keep the team moving. There is a rendezvous to make. Besides, you’ll find no line of sight to the communications satellite out here. And therefore no way to make radio contact.”

“That’s not exactly true.”

Brink turned to glare at James Stone, who stood holding a dinner-plate-size drone in his hands.

“What’s that supposed to be?” asked Brink.

Stone shrugged, wearing a sheepish grin.

“She’s my baby, highly customized. I brought her in my personal effects, instead of a change of clothes.”

Brink snorted in disgust, turning away.

Moments later, the carbon fiber drone was rising slowly through the canopy, picking its way through a maze of branches and vines. A string of wire filament trailed below it like a fishing line. The buzzing drone soon emerged through a small gap in the upper tree canopy, an alien visitor to the sun-soaked roof of the tropical rain forest.

Vedala dialed a direct line to the International Space Station.

An instant after the satellite uplink was established, a frantic flurry of invisible data leaped up from the green expanse of trees and into the blackness of the void above.

A Higher Analysis

AT THE HEART OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION, several hundred miles above the Amazon jungle, a humanoid form stood shrouded in shadows, still and silent. As it drifted slightly in the microgravity, the reddish pulse of a status light shone from the sinuous curves of its outer casing. The anodized aluminum was smooth, honed to a perfect golden sheen, but most of all it was clean—indeed, it had never been touched by human hands.

The experimental Robonaut R3A4 humanoid robot had been constructed inside this room by its predecessor, had never left its sealed environment, and was the sole permanent occupant of the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module.

Although untouched by human hands, the Robonaut was often touched by human thoughts .

One by one, a ring of white lights blinked on inside the cylindrical laboratory module. LEDs on the upper chest of the R3A4 blinked from red to green. And in a subtle, complex symphony of movement and attention, the Robonaut appeared to come alive. The machine glanced down at its own hands, flexing each finger with startling dexterity. It then turned to face a wall of containment cabinets, each housing a separate experiment, stacked together like brightly lit fish tanks.

Invented and perfected through multiple grant iterations by NASA’s Dexterous Robotics Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, the R3A4 occupied the same form factor as a human astronaut. A one-to-one match with the human body made for easy teleoperation—although the R3A4 was stronger, faster, and had better sensory capabilities than its human operators.

And this R3A4 was especially unique.

The Wildfire Robonaut had been tailor-made for Dr. Sophie Kline. The brain-computer interface Kline had used since childhood had been modified to wirelessly transmit her most subtle gestures to the R3A4. Locked inside its permanent home, the machine could carry out her experiments without risk of bacteria, dirt, or any foreign bodies that might compromise the platonically perfect cleanliness of the Wildfire laboratory.

The R3A4 went to work.

Twenty yards away in the Destiny laboratory module, Sophie Kline floated beside a remote workstation, wearing a slim pair of virtual reality goggles and instrumented gloves. She could see through the machine’s eyes, feel with its hands, and mentally inhabit the Robonaut with little effort. Over the years, the machine had become an extension of her own body—a hard metal incarnation of herself that Kline secretly relished inhabiting.

In the Amazon rain forest far below, the Wildfire field team had sent up a barrage of data collected from dead primates. Now, Kline had the eyes of her second skin set to maximum magnification, comparing the incoming data to a live sample of the Andromeda Strain AS-1—a specimen that had been retrieved directly from Piedmont, Arizona.

The transcript of her communication with the field scientists, monitored by NORTHCOM and confirmed against the audio logs of a salvaged canary drone, was as follows:

GRND-VEDALA

Kline. Data transfer is complete. We have limited time. Our drone can only loiter in communication range for a couple minutes.

ISS-KLINE

Roger that, Vedala. Preliminary results do confirm a match to Andromeda.

GRND-VEDALA

Our results concur. But which strain are we dealing with? Can you compare to the Piedmont samples?

ISS-KLINE

Hold on. [fifteen seconds elapse]

ISS-KLINE

It . . . this isn’t AS-1 or AS-2. You’ve hit on something new.

GRND-VEDALA

[static] Another evolution?

ISS-KLINE

Call it AS-3.

GRND-VEDALA

Is it dangerous?

ISS-KLINE

Affirmative. I advise you abort mission and retreat to the quarantine perimeter. The anomaly is growing out of control. And another unidentified structure is rising from the lake. There is nothing more your team can do, you understand?

GRND-VEDALA

We’ve got a lot of dead primates down here, and not a lot of time. What exactly did you find? Will it react to inhibitor?

ISS-KLINE

It’s nonreactive to the inhibitor, but the sample exhibits deadly properties of both previous strains.

GRND-VEDALA

I assumed as much. We’re continuing.

ISS-KLINE

Nidhi, listen. The first Andromeda strain triggered on contact with life. It killed those people in Piedmont and then evolved into AS-2, which eats the plastic necessary for spaceflight. It’s not a coincidence.

GRND-VEDALA

So you’re hypothesizing that Andromeda mutated in order to trap our species on Earth’s surface? It’s an interesting theory, but irrelevant.