Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Listening.

“Water,” said Odhiambo. “Water is coming.”

Best-Laid Plans

DR. SOPHIE KLINE WAS NOT OVERLY TROUBLED BY what was occurring below. Though she knew full well the implications of her recent actions, her neural oscillations (measured constantly via the brain-computer interface) were once again concentrated between 8 and 12 Hz—an alpha state indicating a calm alertness.

The lives of her team members were no longer her concern.

Kline was minutes away from reaching a goal she had dreamed about for years. She had sacrificed family and personal relationships, devoting nearly every waking moment to reach this precise moment in time and (more importantly) space. And she had spent the day running a final experiment.

The ISS had continued accelerating, hour after hour, with nothing to slow it down. To the consternation of Mission Control, it had traveled over ten thousand miles beyond its normal orbit. It was much too late to stop now.

Even armed with hard data collected via brain-computer interface, the true mindset of an individual is impossible to fully reconstruct. Yet we are uniquely fortunate to have detailed records of Kline’s neural state during these final moments, before all contact was lost. These data were worth considering, at least, given what Kline was about to perpetrate.

In her studies at the University of Washington, the renowned forensic psychologist Dr. Rachel Pittman discovered a type of anticipatory focus associated with committed scientists—a pattern consistent with Kline’s neural data. Pittman found that scientists tend to score very high on delay of gratification (DOG) indices, an expected outcome, since researchers must often wait for years before receiving a reward for their effort. Kline’s thought process at this juncture had shifted toward “anticipatory reward”—a mode in which the moral abhorrence of recent events seems insignificant compared to the scientific outcome.

The ability to delay reward—exhibiting supreme confidence in a hypothesis that has taken years to pay off—is what allowed Kline to achieve success, and it is what blinded her to the horror of her actions in these moments.

This is not meant to be an excuse, simply an explanation.

After seizing control of the International Space Station, Kline had spent an extra forty-five minutes retrieving and donning the Cardioflow, a pair of pressurized leggings designed to distribute blood from the lower body into the head. In microgravity, astronauts often report a “cloudy” feeling, as if they’ve been standing on their heads. These leggings were designed to squeeze blood up from the lower body to improve circulation, thinking, and comfort. If employed for too long, however, they could cause blackouts and, eventually, death.

The result, for the moment, was that as she completed her final experiments, Kline felt completely fresh and clearheaded, for the first time since she had arrived on board the ISS. In video footage, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright and alert. She was seen smiling as she flexed her hands in the sweaty telepresence gloves, orchestrating control of the R3A4.

Inside the windowless pod of the Wildfire laboratory module, the fabric-covered arms of the R3A4 were in constant motion. Details of what followed are strictly classified, but a partial recording of the experiment was recovered.

The robot’s work was being executed in a custom-built biological safety cabinet—an enclosure designed to limit exposure to biohazards while interacting with infectious agents. The sterilized robot had no need for gloves, much less the bulky blue positive-pressure suits and helmets employed by human researchers. The air within the laboratory module had been replaced with a nonreactive argon-nitrogen mix.

The cabinet was embedded in the wall, a well-lit cradle with a hood of glass allowing space beneath for the robot’s arms to operate. Inside, negative air pressure pulled air up through a HEPA filter to prevent particles from escaping the cradle and polluting other microgravity experiments.

Cameras mounted under the cabinet hood were meant to meticulously record every experimental trial. Working backward from this point in time, forensic videographers discovered missing tape going back several years—evidence that Kline had carried out (and covered up) a long series of illicit experiments. All told, over one hundred hours of experimentation were unaccounted for, most of them occurring in fifteen-minute segments.

Under the magnification built into its vision system, the R3A4 turned its gaze to a sample of AS-3, trapped under a flat glass slide. It had been created in secret by Kline herself, by modifying the existing samples discovered five decades before. The tiny six-sided microparticles had been arranged in a line. Scaling her hand movements to 1:50,000—approximately one micrometer per five centimeters—Kline used her unique mental interface to puppeteer the steady hands of the R3A4 through an experimental ballet that was breathtaking to behold.

In the form of a machine, all of Kline’s human vulnerability had been stripped away—she was now operating in a realm of perfect scientific experimentation. No human hands could ever manipulate an object at this scale and with this amount of grace. With confident swoops and dips of her robotic end effectors, she painted the line of Andromeda microparticles with a catalyst agent. Seconds later, she painted the same area with a growth substrate of liquid carbon dioxide.

The reaction was swift and mesmerizing.

Each microparticle of AS-3 began a version of the “mitosis” witnessed in larger scale on the anomaly. The sum total began to dance and skitter under the glass plate. Kline watched as the faint line began to grow in two dimensions, soon taking on the shape of a stamp.

Moving quickly—indeed, well beyond the limits of human ability—Kline applied a growth-inhibiting agent to the top and both sides of the expanding particles, curtailing their voracious spread. Even so, some of the particles along these faces began consuming a small portion of the experimental tray. In places, the ceramic surface crumbled into a gray, ashlike substance.

The R3A4 moved quickly, avoiding contact with the rapidly multiplying microparticles. Its ortho fabric-coated hands gleamed with a thick coating of Vedala’s inhibitor substance, applied during its construction to prevent reactions with either Andromeda strain.

A structure began to emerge on the macro scale—a ribbon shape, about as wide as a sheet of paper and thinner than a human hair. It continued to grow along its bottom edge only, like a scarf weaving itself longer and longer.

The ribbon soon expanded beyond the confines of its experimental tray. In a swift motion, the robot drew back an arm and rapped its knuckles across the face of the biological safety cabinet. On the second rap, the cover shattered into floating glass shards (all use of polymers had been curtailed, for obvious reasons).

At some point in the past, Kline had reset the force allowances on the robot’s actuators. Electric motors by their design can exert instant and crushing torque—making them more than capable of tearing themselves apart. As a result, these motors were limited by an acceleration profile coded into the software and monitored by three independent and redundant sensing systems. But disabling this acceleration profile would have been possible for an expert.

By removing the safety constraints, Kline had greatly multiplied the Robonaut’s ability to move in ways that could be both constructive and destructive.

Reaching through thick slivers of broken glass, the R3A4 pulled out the tray containing the metallic ribbon. It was now over a foot long and continuing to grow. The robot carried the ribbon to the crown of the Wildfire module—the overhead point at which the module was docked to the Harmony node, and from there attached to the entire International Space Station. It was a location chosen to complete the ruse that the laboratory was simply a cargo module.