Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Most recently, the Hayabusa Japanese probe had made landfall on the tumbling, cigar-shaped asteroid BR-3. While it was there, an obscure sensor called Andro returned a seemingly innocuous reading, tagged onto the end of a larger report. The result was meaningful only to a small handful of researchers and military personnel.

Andromeda had proliferated across our solar system.

The scientists on the original Project Wildfire had been correct to invoke the Messenger Theory, first proposed by John R. Samuels in the spring of 1962. Simply put, the best way to find life in a mostly empty galaxy would be to send out a probe that could make copies of itself on arrival, and then spread those copies to other stars in an act of exponential exploration.

Kline had studied every aspect of the microparticle. She knew it thrived in hard vacuum, lasting for countless millennia and self-replicating without producing waste. It lacked amino acids, meaning no proteins, no enzymes or any of the “building blocks of life,” and it was housed in a nonbiological crystalline cell structure.

Finally, she had come to a conclusion.

The Andromeda Strain wasn’t a microorganism. It wasn’t alive, exactly. The extraterrestrial microparticle was in fact a highly complex machine .

Kline reasoned that AS-1 had been a probe, designed to travel to other star systems and then make copies of itself and wait. For the last several hundred thousand years it had done just that. What it had been waiting for was triggered on February 8, 1967, in a small home on the outskirts of Piedmont, Arizona. On that day, a town doctor named Alan Benedict made the foolhardy decision to open the hatch of a salvaged Scoop VII satellite.

The Andromeda Strain had been waiting for life.

AS-1 infected living organisms, triggering an evolution into the AS-2 plastiphage configuration, which escaped from the depths of Project Wildfire and propagated in the atmosphere, dissolving the advanced plastics needed to reach low Earth orbit.

It had detected life, and then evolved into an insidious barrier.

And it is this conclusion that helps explain Kline’s motivation. She saw the Andromeda Strain as yet another unfair obstacle among a lifetime of them. She believed the microparticle was designed with hostile intent—to detect life and then keep it from reaching planetary orbit. It was a wall , preventing our species from achieving its rightful destiny among the stars.

She would have considered it a personal affront.

Kline wondered how many other alien species had been trapped. Privately, she speculated that this was the solution to the Fermi paradox, which asks, given the billions of Earth-like planets in the universe, Where is everyone?

Imprisoned on their home worlds by Andromeda, Kline assumed.

Humankind’s first contact with an alien intelligence had not been a friendly affair. It had been a preemptive act of war.

And Sophie Kline was now preparing a counterattack. She had studied her adversary and painstakingly determined how to manipulate the microparticle into new configurations during her work in the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory. Her plan was to use Andromeda against itself, to destroy the obstacle it posed to human expansion into space, once and for all.

Kline had repositioned her remote manipulation station inside the Leonardo Permanent Multipurpose Module and closed the hatchway. Her hands were wrapped in teleoperation gloves and her head-mounted display was tight over her eyes as she took mental control of the R3A4 humanoid robot. The brain-computer interface to the station allowed her to send commands at the speed of thought.

The safeguards necessary to run a BSL-5 laboratory module on an inhabited space station called for emergency root access over the low- and high-level control infrastructure of the entire sprawling structure—an unprecedented level of backchannel command.

At UTC 17:24:11 a containment breach emergency was declared from inside the lab module. Like dominoes falling, every ISS subsystem, including communication, propulsion, and life support, relinquished its control. And as simply as that, Sophie Kline had seized total authority over the International Space Station.

Following standard emergency procedure, Kline’s two crewmates made their way into the Zvezda service module. A cornerstone of the early station construction, the Zvezda was self-sustaining and outfitted with both Russian and American computer systems. A Soyuz crew return vehicle was docked on the module’s aft port.

Kline had already moved to block all outgoing radio transmissions, sever connection to ground control,* and disable the onboard Wi-Fi. She then sealed the common berthing mechanisms (CBMs) in the Unity node connecting to the Zarya and Zvezda modules, effectively trapping the two other astronauts. And finally, she set all life support to backup power and cut the interior lights to conserve energy.

The SEP thrusters activated, converting electrical power collected by the solar panel array into continuous upward force. A shiver went through the entire structure, and a high-pitched whine could be heard. Objects in free fall, including the astronauts themselves, began to lower toward the deckside surface as the ISS rapidly gained altitude.

Yanking her head-mounted display up onto her forehead, Kline delivered a pronouncement over the station-wide closed-circuit camera to her two fellow astronauts in the Zvezda module.

“This is Dr. Sophie Kline. I am declaring an emergency and seizing station resources. From this moment until the emergency is over, you are to remain confined to your current module. Do not attempt to make outside contact. Do not attempt to leave your module. You will receive more information as needed. But for the time being, the International Space Station is on lockdown.”

The surprised faces of Yury Komarov and Jin Hamanaka oriented to the camera. Kline cut the feed, leaving only a black screen and stunned silence.

Of course, Kline’s crewmates immediately set about defying her orders. They found the CBM passageway jammed from the outside, all communications equipment disabled, and electricity distribution cut to essential levels. Because life support connections are run along the outside skin of the station, regardless of whether the interior hatchways are open or closed, the astronauts remained safe inside their module, with plenty of air, food, water, and facilities for elimination.

What they were not in possession of was the ability to leave, or to easily communicate with the outside world. Thinking quickly, Jin Hamanaka retrieved a high-power laser diode from an optics experiment that had been stowed for return in the Soyuz. The class 3B diode was emerald green and powerful, though not classified as hazardous. Hamanaka was able to shine the battery-powered laser light through one of the small round windows of the Zvezda module toward the surface of the planet below.

At any given moment, an estimated several hundred amateur astronomers are watching the International Space Station as it passes overhead, visible from between two to six minutes. Now orbiting on a new axis, the ISS had attracted a flurry of attention from this small international community of “station gazers.”

As it swept across the globe at 17,500 miles per hour, the ISS generated a rippling wave of surprise. A handful of attentive astronomers in Central America, Southern Europe, and the Middle East were bewildered to see the ISS cruising along without its exterior lights.

They all saw a bright green dot flashing in the belly window of the Zvezda module. Of those handful, more than half were familiar with the nautical language of Morse code. Of those, all were able to recognize the most famous message of all.

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