Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Stone held out the small black device on his flat palm.

The boy’s eyes narrowed in suspicion as the four rotors spun into a blur. A whoosh of air spread below the drone. With a small smile that he hoped was reassuring, Stone lowered his hand and retreated.

The canary drone remained hovering in the air before him.

The boy’s eyes widened in wonder and curiosity. Looking quizzically at the other scientists, he tried to gauge the level of danger from this mystical bird.

Inch by inch, the drone flew nearer to the amazed child.

Confident of the temporary distraction, Stone detached the monitor hanging around his neck and handed it to Vedala. Speaking quietly, he told the group, “All the canary’s sensors are piped into here, including the camera. Use this to examine him for infection. I’ll be busy for the next few minutes.”

With skeptical approval, Vedala took the monitor and flipped the image to infrared. Examining the boy’s skin temperature, she launched into a hushed discussion with Peng Wu regarding what might be the most obvious visual signs of infection.

Meanwhile, Stone had slid a ruggedized laptop that looked like a brick of black plastic out from his backpack. Sitting on the ground, he unfolded a portable keyboard from the back casing and balanced it on his knees.

He began to type frantically.

Vedala examined an up-close image of the boy’s face through the monitor, zooming in on the nose and mouth. She relayed her findings to the other scientists in a hushed voice, without looking up.

“Unlike the others,” she said, “he hasn’t got any of the dark ash around his mouth or nose. And I see no sign of metallic growths on the epidermis.”

Vedala glanced over the monitor at the boy. He was standing on a log, watching the canary drone with bright, alert eyes. It hovered around him in slow circles. He looked like a kitten, ready to pounce.

“Motor and coordination seem to be functioning fine,” she added.

Stone continued typing, elbows sticking out awkwardly from his laptop. Peng was rifling through a leftover hard-case for sample bags. And a few yards away, Odhiambo was stooped over a compact utility shovel, struggling to scoop dirt as rivulets of sweat coursed over his temples.

“Harold, what are you doing?” asked Vedala. “I could use your help.”

Odhiambo turned to face her, still hunched over a shovelful of silty jungle soil. He nodded toward the body, then let his eyes move to the distracted boy.

“Oh,” said Vedala.

Although she was focused on a grand scientific adventure, Vedala had to remind herself that these were human lives that had been lost. Odhiambo had a way of maintaining perspective that she appreciated. It wasn’t a strength she possessed.

“Stone. What about you?” asked Vedala. “The kid won’t be distracted forever by your silly drone.”

Stone responded without looking up from his computer. “That silly drone, as you call it, is a sophisticated robot with all kinds of capabilities. Specifically, it has a camera, a microphone, a small speaker, and copious amounts of AI.”

“So what?”

“Did you notice how the boy moves his hands when he speaks? I think he’s using a subdialect of the Panoan language. What the Matis guides spoke.”

“Great, but none of us can understand it,” said Vedala. “Nobody outside the Amazon has ever even heard this language. They’re uncontacted, remember?”

“No such thing. We’re all connected in history at some point. Every human being. And his language is sure to have plenty in common with the other local dialects. Anyway, we’ll find out soon.”

Stone looked up to Vedala, smiling with pure, almost childlike delight. He tapped a button on his laptop. “I admit I’m a specialist, but my robots aren’t. I brought along a universal speech recognizer and extensive gesture-recognition libraries. What’s more, the diagnostic speaker on the drone is now connected to a text-to-speech synthesizer—”

“Wait,” interrupted Peng, looking over from a disemboweled backpack splayed out in the dirt. “The drone has speech recognition? And a voice?”

Stone smiled at the group. “Our little bird is a translator now.”

“Yes. This is a good idea, Dr. Stone,” added Odhiambo, nodding and smiling. “The boy will talk to the bird. In almost every indigenous mythology, birds serve as messengers. This is a very good idea.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” muttered Vedala.

“First,” said Peng, her brow furrowing as she thought through this new potential advantage, “ask him how he survived, while the rest of his group was infected. He could be the key to saving all of us.”

Thirty yards away, the boy was reaching for the hovering drone. It deftly moved out of the way when his hand approached, performing reflexive object avoidance. The graceful movements seemed to delight the child. Within thirty seconds he had made a small game out of trying to catch the “bird.”

The group of scientists watched the child intently. His knowledge could be invaluable to them.

Stone unleashed a final flurry of typing, his dark blue eyes focused on the screen as his fingers moved rapid-fire across rows of waterproof keys. Nidhi Vedala watched him as he worked. She was beginning to wonder if Stone’s technological adaptability hadn’t made him a useful addition to this mission after all. The knowledge she traditionally respected was stored in other peoples’ heads. But the roboticist seemed to have spread his skill sets outward, into the technology he carried with him.

“Okay, here we go,” Stone said.

Moving gently, the canary lowered itself back within reach. It began blinking its diagnostic lights in a pattern. Fascinated, the child stopped swatting at it and watched with anticipation. Nearing eye level, the drone chirped once, testing the speaker. The boy flashed a startled frown at the device, sitting back against a log.

After a deep breath, Stone held the monitor in both hands and spoke quietly into its microphone.

“Hello. What is your name?”

On the laptop, a universal translator library converted the English into broken Panoan and fed the words to a text-to-speech synthesizer on the drone. Half a second later, the canary emitted a series of vocalizations reminiscent of the language of the Matis guides. Stone had chosen a voice synthesizer with the voice of a young man, hoping the boy would relate to it, but even so the syllables sounded computer generated and strange.

Nevertheless, startled recognition flashed over the boy’s face.

Taken aback, he hopped away from the canary. He stared at the hovering device with concern. Then he looked beyond it, directly at the scientists. With one hand he slowly reached up and touched his bare chest.

He tapped it twice.

“Tupa,” he said.

First Contact

IMUST WARN YOU ALL BEFORE WE BEGIN,” SAID ODHIAMBO in a grave voice. “This is first contact, and Tupa is only a boy. We have no other choice in the matter, and I understand that. But we are nobody’s savior. We are in all likelihood his worst enemy, no matter our good intentions.”

James Stone nodded solemnly, hunched over the monitor as he made final tweaks to the canary’s speech recognition interface. As the boy conversed more in his distinctive language, the speech library had automatically strung a web of probability between unrecognized words and likely corollaries from the half dozen or so related dialects included in the universal translator library.

After only ten minutes of conversation, a bedrock of common words had begun to emerge, some of them nearly identical to existing dialects and others idiosyncratically distinct.

For his part, the boy was quickly picking up on the unique accent of the drone. He seemed adept at discerning its meanings, even when the language used was wrong or the pronunciation incorrect. This uncanny problem-solving ability led Odhiambo to hypothesize that despite their isolation, the Machado must have interacted at least occasionally with outsiders.