Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

“Felix-1, painting target. Trail formation on me. We’re gonna pop the approach, so be ready.”

From the front of the room, an intern named Maxim Lonchev watched General Stern toss another brightly colored bit of calcium carbonate into his mouth. Sitting at a table that had been dragged in from the cafeteria, Lonchev was leaning over his tablet computer. Four minutes earlier, a subprogram had flagged an exception in the NIX-3 satellite data. The image in question was now laid out flat on the table at its maximum resolution.

“Master arm switch is on,” reported the pilot.

The intern was frantically poring over the image, trying to ignore a technical conversation between two other people sharing his table.

Lonchev had designed “Pillion,” an artificial intelligence algorithm that analyzed visual data collected by the NIX-3 cluster. The rudimentary AI was unique in that it was a general-intelligence application with no particular modus operandi. Most algorithms were tailored to find very specific patterns, such as vehicle deployments or radar installations. Maxim Lonchev—acting against the advice of his academic advisor at the Stanford AI Lab—had designed an algorithm that simply looked for potential outliers—in other words, anything interesting.

As such, Pillion was an experimental effort, designed by a university student, and never expected to do much. The necessity of Lonchev’s presence in launch control was, in fact, arguable—and he knew it.

Defining exactly what Pillion found “interesting” had become a principal research challenge. It was also the problem Lonchev now found lying on the table before him. He stared intently at the stitched-together black-and-white image.

“Tally the target,” said the pilot. “We’re headed downtown.”

Pillion had registered an unlikely formation of tree branches. In a small strip of clearing along the anomaly, the configuration had simply been labeled “low probability.” The problem was that this blurry image was a composite, generated by averaging multiple frames of video taken at different times of day from different positions. Lonchev was straining his eyes, trying to figure out why Pillion was showing him this stupid image of scattered branches.

“You want a coffee?” asked the analyst sitting next to him.

“No,” snapped Lonchev. “Thank you. Sorry.”

He winced as his voice echoed loudly. The cavernous room had grown quiet as the pilot spoke again over the radio.

“Let’s get down on the deck. Holding cherubs two for final,” he said in clipped pilot-speak.

In every image, the branches were hidden by the tree canopy or shadows from it, as well as the heat and electromagnetic interference washing off the surface of the anomaly. Reconstructed, the picture was blurry and choppy. Impossible to interpret.

“Alive?” asked the talkative analyst.

Lonchev looked up, hair mussed from running his fingers through it. “Yes, I’m alive. I’m also busy.”

“No, alive ,” said the analyst, rotating the tablet until it was upside down. “Those tree branches are laid out in a message. See it there? ‘Alive.’”

“Felix-1 is in hot.”

Lonchev’s mouth popped open into a surprised “Oh.”

He scrambled to his feet, his knees loudly jarring the table, causing heads to turn. He stopped, breathing hard, his face flushed red with embarrassment. Legs shaking, he stared out at a room full of high-ranking officials who could make or break his career with a few words. Lonchev hesitated another second.

And then the graduate student began to shout.

Entry

COCOONED IN A HAMMOCK ILLUMINATED BY A HINT of gray morning light, Nidhi Vedala listened as the scream of jet engines died away. The flaring burst of napalm she expected had not cascaded through the canopy in fingers of bright flame. Nor had the scorching heat of a nuclear blast wave washed across the face of the alien structure. A relieved smile eased itself onto her face. Odhiambo’s crude message of fallen tree branches must have been received.

It appeared the field team was going to survive another day.

The night had been utterly uneventful. Nothing living seemed to be left in this area of the jungle—a stark and disturbing contrast to the chaos of noise and life the team had experienced on the march to get here. Even the trees and plants seemed to shy away from the foreign material. Their high, skeletal branches reached like shriveled claws under the thin haze of smoke that rose from charred leaves. The near-total quiet combined with the unnatural heat and dryness made it feel as if the environment itself was being transformed around them, from verdant rain forest to . . . something else.

Stone’s physiological monitoring logs showed that he had been thrashing with nightmares for most of the night—even worse than usual. The entire team had spent the hours of darkness drifting in and out of fitful bouts of unrest. Only the young Tupa seemed to sleep peacefully, comfortable in an extra hammock, his doubts and fears drowned in an inescapable flood of pure exhaustion.

Rolling out of her hammock, Vedala roused the rest of the field team and ordered them to assemble at the mouth of the anomaly immediately after breakfast. As Peng set about restarting the campfire, Vedala laced her boots tightly and reapplied inhibitor over her sleeved arms. Munching on a granola bar, she made her way alone through silent trees to the slick riverbank.

The structure had not undergone any more growth spurts in the preceding hours. Even so, Vedala felt she could sense a thrumming force inside the featureless structure. There seemed to be a kind of potential energy growing within, as if it was gathering itself up for another expansion.

Sitting on the dry tip of a hundred-foot log embedded in the sucking mud of the riverbed, Vedala let her feet dangle and studied the hexagonal mouth of the tunnel. The breach was human-size, positioned to the left of a cascade of yellow-brown water that flowed out from under the anomaly. Following the contours of the muddy riverbank, the scummy stream was heaped with mounds of froth.

Hazy morning sunlight fell in shafts over the hushed riverbank.

Vedala noted flakes of broken anomaly material scattered about the tunnel entrance. Most of the jagged stones lay among cratered streaks of mud. In some places, she could see empty holes—likely from pieces that had been harvested by the Machado. But the overall pattern of the streaks radiated away from the entrance. It gave the scene the kinetic texture of a debris field, as if the shards had erupted from the mouth of the tunnel.

Vedala’s mind returned to Tupa’s description of the angry god’s roar, and Kline’s admonition to run away.

A wave of air washed over the back of her neck, and Vedala heard the whir of a canary. She also smelled coffee. James Stone emerged from the trees, carrying a tin cup in each hand. He was already hypothesizing out loud.

“The breach there is caked in the same ash substance we found before,” he said, pointing with a glinting cup. “Some pieces are missing from around the tunnel mouth. I’ve got the canaries on constant alert for airborne toxins, of course. But there don’t seem to be any. Anyhow, we’d already know by now if there were.”

Stone sat down on the log beside Vedala, handing her a cup.

“We’d be dead,” he added.

“I’ve been mulling that,” said Vedala. “The ash and flaked rocks are solid substrates. But a lot more material must have been vaporized by an explosion. The Machado breathed in the cloud of dust, only trace amounts, and it activated inside their bodies, slowly at first . . . but it drove them crazy. Very similar to Piedmont.”

Vedala sipped her coffee.