Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Paulo knew that Marvin was muito inteligente , but it had outright rejected this new data as not classifiable. This was something the algorithm had never seen, not in all its petabytes of training data.

In fact, it was something nobody had ever seen.

The output simply read: CLASSIFICATION RESULTS: UNKNOWN.

Marvin hadn’t even offered a probability distribution.

Paulo didn’t like it. He made a kind of surprised grunt, the cigarette trembling on his lower lip. Tapping keys rapidly, he enlarged the thumbnail image and examined it from every available angle, trying to dismiss it as a glitch. But it was no use—the strange sight defied explanation.

Something black was rising from the deepest jungle. Something very big.

Paulo waved smoke away with one hand, his gut pressing against the cool metal desk. He squinted at the dim screen, pushing his face closer. His balding head was coated in a cold sweat, gleaming under the stark light of the bulb overhead.

“No,” Paulo was recorded as saying to himself. “Isto é impossível.”

Thumbing a switch on a battered 3-D printer, Paulo waited impatiently as the raw image data was transferred to the boxy machine. The shack soon filled with the warm wax smell of melting plastic as an array of pulsing lasers set to work. Inch by inch, a hardened layer of plastic rose from the flat bed of the printer. As the seconds ticked by, the formless sludge resolved into a three-dimensional topographic map.

The pale white plastic was rising up in the detailed shape of the jungle canopy, looking for all the world like a bed of cauliflower.

Rolling and lighting yet another cigarette by instinct, Paulo tried not to watch as a new world slowly emerged from the unformed ooze. Each layer hardened in seconds, quickly firming into a scale model of the jungle. Wheezing slightly, Paulo cracked his knuckles one by one, staring blankly and smoking in silence.

In the rare instance that Marvin returned less than an 80 percent classification probability, it was up to Paulo to make the final determination. He did so by employing a carefully honed method that was strictly unavailable to the machine: his sense of touch.

Touch is the most ancient sensory faculty of any living organism. The human body is almost entirely covered with tactile sensors. The neural circuits related to the somatosensory system overlap with multiple other areas of sensing, in ways both unknown and unstudied. Of particular sensitivity are the countless mechanoreceptors in our lips, tongue, feet, and, most especially, our fingertips.

This was Paulo’s talent—one area where man rose above machine.

Eyes half closed, he began with static contact, lightly placing all eight of his finger pads on the model surface. Gently, Paulo added steady pressure to establish a touch baseline. And finally he scanned his fingers laterally over the meticulously rendered folds of jungle canopy.

Properly honed, the discriminatory power of skin receptors can exceed visual acuity. Every inch of the model’s texture corresponded to roughly one hundred yards of real-world terrain, resulting in contours only detectable through a cutaneous spatial resolution far superior to any computer’s image analysis, no matter how clever the machine.

Paulo could run his fingertips over the roof of the jungle and feel whether an unclassified data sample was the ragged, chainsawed destruction of an airstrip or the smooth banks of an innocent new river tributary.

Eyes closed, limp cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Paulo slouched, his face to the ceiling. His outstretched hands traced the surface of the jungle as if he were a blind god touching the face of the planet.

When his questing fingers found the hard, unnatural lines of the . . . thing, Paulo Araña swallowed a low moan in the back of his throat. Whatever it was, it really did exist. But there were no roads nearby. No sign of construction. It could not be possible—out there alone and colossal among the primordial trees—and yet it was as real as touching the stubble on his own face.

The thing in the jungle rose at least a hundred feet above a skirt of raw wilderness, long and slightly curved, like a barricade. It spoiled the sanctity of a rain forest otherwise unbroken for thousands of square miles. And it seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

Around the perimeter of the structure, Paulo could feel a crumbling sensation. It was the texture of death—thousands of virgin trees collapsed and sick. This thing was a kind of pestilence, polluting everything nearby.

For a long moment, Paulo sat and contemplated raising an alert on the antiquated FUNAI-issued shortwave radio sitting on his desk. His eyes lingered on its silver dials as the generator puttered outside, providing the trickle of electricity necessary to connect this isolated shack to the rest of the world.

Pushing away from the desk, Paulo felt blindly under the drawers until his fingers brushed against a business card taped beneath. It contained the phone number of a young American who had recently contacted Paulo.

Claiming to be a businessman, the man had explained that a Chinese aircraft had recently been lost over this territory. His company was willing to pay a hefty price for information about it. Paulo had assumed (and continued to assume) that the American was looking for pieces of airplane wreckage, although he hadn’t said that. Not exactly. Instead, the man had said specifically to report “anything strange.”

And this was definitely that.

Using his palms to wipe away the sheen of sweat that soaked his face like tears, Paulo stared at the business card and punched a number on his desk phone.

A man with an American accent answered on the first ring.

“I’m glad you called, Mr. Araña,” said the voice. “I was right to trust you.”

“You already know?” Paulo asked, glancing at the computer screen.

“Marvin rang me just now, when you registered the anomalous classification,” said the voice. “He’s smarter than he looks.”

The Americans and their trickery. It never ceased to amaze Paulo. A people who seemed so trusting and forthright—all smiles . . . and yet.

“What now?” asked Paulo.

“You can relax, Mr. Araña. We’ve got people taking care of it. You’ll be well compensated for your assistance. But I am curious,” asked the voice. “What do you think it is?”

“I know it is not an error, senhor. It’s really out there. I have touched it.”

“Well, then?”

Paulo thought for a moment before answering. “It is a plague. Killing everything it touches. But I can never know what it is.”

“And why is that?”

“Because that thing out there . . . it was not built by any human hands.”

Fairchild AFB

NEARLY FIVE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, NEAR TACOMA, Washington, Colonel Stacy Hopper was arriving to a quiet morning shift at Fairchild Air Force Base. A skeleton crew of intelligence analysts who had worked overnight were just clocking out, leaving behind dimmed monitors on neat desks and a meager work log indicating that, as usual, nothing much had happened.

Crisply uniformed in her air force blues, complete with a service cap, tie tab fastened neatly around her neck, and sensible black hosiery, Hopper eyed the windowless control room. A thermos of coffee rested in the crook of her arm. Her morning crew of eight uniformed intelligence analysts were settling into their consoles, saying their good mornings, and slipping on headsets. Many of them had damp shoulders, having just arrived to work on another rainy morning in the Pacific Northwest.

Hopper sat down at her own console at the back of the room, enjoying the soft murmuring of her analysts’ voices. Glancing up at the telemetry monitors lining the front wall, she saw nothing out of the ordinary—just the way she liked it.