Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

“Our clearing is gone,” Vedala said matter-of-factly. “The anomaly must have grown since we set out. We’ve got no line of sight to the communications satellites.”

She craned her neck, spying only a narrow slit of blue sky between the towering face of the anomaly and a wild confusion of jungle that crept to the very edge of it. She stood with the satellite radio in both hands, holding it like a baby. The phone had been fitted with a black antenna shaped like a tongue depressor. The connection bars sat flat and dark.

Tupa watched from beyond the tree line, highly entertained by Vedala’s gesticulations. The rest of the field team was not so amused, as her worried expression clearly telegraphed the danger they were in.

“Is this really our only approach? It isn’t going to work,” said Stone.

Vedala replied, not looking away, “It’s an Iridium phone. Coverage is provided by over sixty satellites on polar orbits a couple hundred miles up. It’s always shifting, so there’s still a chance we’ll hit a connection.”

“And if we don’t?” asked Stone.

Stopping, Vedala turned to the group.

“If we don’t rendezvous, they’ll assume we’re dead. And if they believe we’re dead . . . they’ll move on to contingency plans.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It is not good,” said Peng Wu. “The military instinct will be to wipe out the entire area. Purge it completely, and us with it.”

The team was now past rendezvous by over five hours.

Peng Wu threw her pack on the ground beside the anomaly. She hastily extracted hard-copy topographic maps of the surrounding area. Head down, eyes trained on the data, she said, “Nidhi is right. Everything has changed. Mainly, this thing is a lot bigger than it was when we first set out.”

“Haiya,” exclaimed Odhiambo in his native tongue. “How can that be? I see no evidence of construction. It’s not as if this thing is alive .”

“Okay, we can start with a canary survey—” began Stone, before Odhiambo shushed him with a wave of his hand.

“No, wait,” said Odhiambo. “Listen to that.”

The twisted, curled branches and dried leaves around them had begun to rattle. A mass of warm air was cascading up the face of the anomaly and brushing against the tree line.

“Strange. There is rarely wind beneath the canopy,” said Odhiambo.

“The anomaly is tall. It must be channeling a breeze,” offered Vedala.

“Not likely,” said Odhiambo. “This air is moving upward.”

Tupa whimpered and backed away, his dark hair fluttering in the rising rush of wind. A deep, subterranean groan was emanating from the dirt beneath their feet. The scientists put their arms out for balance in the quaking jungle, shooting terrified glances at each other.

Stone glanced at the feed from a canary drone on the monitor hanging around his neck, switching from visible light to infrared. The face of the anomaly erupted into blazing white light.

“Move away!” shouted Stone, stepping back. “It’s heating up fast!”

“What is this?” cried Peng. She stood near the wall, machete clenched in her fist. Her long black hair flew in the whirlwind of air rushing upward. “What’s happening to it?”

The unearthly groan rose in pitch as tons of dirt and rock and roots were violently shifted somewhere underground. Meanwhile, the surface of the anomaly was pulsing—as if it were vibrating at a rate too fast to see.

“I think we are about to find out,” said Harold, pulling on Peng’s shoulder. She did not move, continuing to stare up at the anomaly with calculating eyes. Her machete trembled in her outstretched hand. Shrugging away from Odhiambo’s grasp, Peng stepped forward and pressed the tip of the machete blade against the trembling surface.

“Peng!” called Odhiambo, backpedaling away from the heat. “Stop this!”

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the steel machete blade began to change color in a slow wave, from the tip moving back, darkening to a dull red and then brightening toward orange. The tip finally erupted into an incandescent yellow-white color. With a cry of pain, Peng dropped the blade to the jungle floor. It lay there steaming, bits of carbon in the superheated steel twinkling like stars against an apocalyptic sky.

“Oxidation,” she said, backing away with a forearm across her face. “Over a thousand degrees Celsius, based on the color of that steel.”

The ragged border of jungle canopy had begun to writhe, leaves chattering and branches creaking. Seed pods plummeted down from hundreds of feet above, thudding into the ground, followed by a dry snowfall of crisp leaves and lichen and bark.

Shielding themselves from falling debris, the group stared in awe at the face of the anomaly from the safety of the forest. What they saw next was impossible to reconstruct in video, despite extensive attempts to utilize super-resolution techniques on recovered footage.

The skin of the anomaly erupted in rotating hexagonal lines, a hypnotic chaos of overlapping patterns. Nidhi Vedala postulated directly afterward that the artifacts could have been a macro-level effect sprouting from the cellular structure of trillions of smaller Andromeda microparticles. These etched shapes revolved in a repeating pattern that optically froze in the way fan blades seem to stop spinning against a white ceiling.

It was by all accounts a mesmerizing sight.

Satellite footage showed that the surface of the anomaly throbbed once and then lurched, a trembling shudder that seemed to ripple through the structure. The seismic activity and pattern of rotating lines were disorienting, so much so that Peng Wu fell to the ground unconscious.

A final, intense blast of heat swept off the wall and flowed through the wet rain forest. Among the trees, the team cowered together.

“I know what this is,” said Vedala, shouting just to hear herself. “I know exactly what this is!”

Finally, the entire anomaly flashed purple before expanding —erupting outward and upward, and growing by nearly a foot in all its dimensions. The illusory hexagonal shapes grew more defined before fading, rotating back into nothingness like the aperture of a camera lens collapsing to a pinprick.

The jungle was still.

“Impossible, impossible,” muttered Odhiambo, hoarse with fright.

“It grew,” called Stone. “It’s even bigger now.”

Stone helped Peng up from where she was sitting tangled among roots. During the event, none of the other scientists had realized she had fainted. Though muddied and nursing a lump on the back of her head, Peng did nothing to indicate she had been in distress.

Vedala looked around at the field team as if noticing them for the first time. Her face was flushed. All of them had suffered minor sunburns. The group had witnessed something unexplainable, but as a materials specialist Vedala understood at least one thing—the anomaly represented an unimaginable leap forward in technology.

Vedala spoke in a steady, quiet voice to the group.

“What we have just witnessed is beyond any known human scientific capability. Once I get a sample of it under a microscope, I’ll confirm, but my bet is that we will find that this entire anomaly is made of an Andromeda-based nanomaterial. The structure just underwent a form of . . . mitosis is the best description. Like cell division. Each microparticle split and produced a copy of itself.”

“That sounds familiar,” said Stone. “My father documented this behavior during the first Andromeda incident. Except that he and Dr. Leavitt only observed it happening on a microscopic scale. It flashed purple, and then it underwent something akin to cellular division.”

“How?” asked Peng. “What could it use as fuel out here?”