Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Dedication

For M. C.

Andromeda Evolution

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Andromeda Evolution

Day 0: Contact

Event Classification

Fairchild AFB

Alert

Day 1: Terra Indigena

Emergency Debris Avoidance Maneuver

Heavenly Palace

Code Name Andromeda

Boots on the Ground

Noon Field Briefing

Manifest

Day 2: Wildfire

Dawn Discovery

Twenty-Mile Perimeter

A Higher Analysis

Incomplete Information

Second Camp

Day 3: Anomaly

Night Ambush

Alpha and Omega

In the Morning Light

Outcomes

Indios Bravos

First Contact

Plan B

The Anomaly

Fail-Safe

Day 4: Breach

Operation Scorched Earth

Dawn Strike

Entry

Primary Descent

Evolutions

Forensics

Fight or Flight

State of Emergency

The Tunnel

Best-Laid Plans

Inundation

Activation

Day 5: Ascent

A New Paradigm

Finger of God

Realignment

Z-Axis

Mission Preparation

Destination ISS

Docking Procedure

Stone’s Theory

Reunited

Goodbyes

Intercepted Transmission

Super-Terminal Velocity

Resolution

Out of Eden

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

References

About the Authors

Also by Michael Crichton

Copyright

About the Publisher

Day 0Contact

The future is coming faster than most people realize.

—MICHAEL CRICHTON

Event Classification

WHEN IT ALL BEGAN AGAIN, PAULO ARAÑA WOULD have been bored. Bored and sleepy. He was only a year from retirement from the National Indian Foundation of Brazil, known under its Portuguese acronym FUNAI. Stationed on the outskirts of government-protected land stretching across the Amazon basin, the sertanista was in his mid-fifties and had spent his career protecting the undeveloped interior of Brazil. He was sitting under a flickering, generator-run lightbulb, lulled to drowsiness by the rising morning heat and the familiar sounds of the untamed jungle outside the open windows of his monitoring station.

Paulo was at least thirty pounds overweight, sweating in his official olive FUNAI uniform, and seated before an old metal desk loaded with an eclectic array of electronic equipment. As was his habit, he was squinting down at his lap, his concentration focused intently on hand-rolling a tobacco cigarette with his blunt yet surprisingly agile fingers.

His movements were sure and quick, with no hesitation or trembling, despite the gray whiskers jutting from his cheeks and his steadily failing eyesight.

As he lit and puffed contentedly on his cigarro, Paulo did not notice the red warning light flashing on his computer monitor.

It was a small oversight, normally harmless, and yet on this morning it carried consequences that had already begun to snowball exponentially. The unseen light was hidden behind the curl of a yellow sticky note (directions to a local fishing hole). It had been blinking unheeded since late afternoon the day before.

The flashing pixels were signaling the beginning of a global emergency.

A THOUSAND FEET overhead, an Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) the size of a school bus was thrumming steadily over the vast Amazonian jungle. Dubbed the Abutre-rei—“King Vulture” in Portuguese — its wheels were caked in reddish jungle mud from a rough landing strip and its white hull streaked with the corpses of insects. Nevertheless, the drone was sleek and predatory—like an artifact from the distant future that had slipped backward in time to hover over this prehistoric land.

The Abutre-rei was on an endless mission, sweeping back and forth over a green sea of jungle canopy that stretched to all horizons. The unblinking black eye of its gyro-stabilized, self-cleaning camera lens was trained on the ground below, and a Seeker ultra-wideband synthetic-aperture radar unit invisibly illuminated the complex terrain with timed pulses of radio waves that could penetrate rain, dust, and mist. Back and forth, back and forth. The drone was specialized for environmental monitoring and photogrammetry—relentlessly constructing and reconstructing an ultra-high-resolution map of the Amazon basin.

Inside his monitoring station, Paulo only half watched as the constantly updating image knitted itself together on his monitor. An occasional haze of stale bluish smoke rose from the spit-soaked cigarro parked in its usual spot at the corner of his mouth.

Everything changed at precisely 14:08:24 UTC.

At that moment, a new vertical strip of mapped terrain was added to the composite image. The unseen warning light was displaced fifty pixels to the left, just peeking out from under the sticky note.

Stunned, Paulo Araña stared at the pulsing red spot.

In recovered webcam footage, he could be seen blinking frantically, trying to clear his eyes. Then he snatched away the sticky note and crumpled it in his fingers. The dot was located beside a small thumbnail image of something the Abutre-rei had found in the jungle. Something Paulo could not even begin to explain.

Paulo Araña’s job at FUNAI was to monitor and protect an exclusion zone established around the easternmost region of the Upper Amazon—over thirty-two thousand square miles of unbroken jungle. It was a priceless treasure, site of both the largest concentration of biodiversity on earth and a terra indigena that was home to approximately forty uncontacted Amazonian tribes—pockets of indigenous human civilization with little or no exposure to the technology and disease of the outside world.

With such natural riches, the land was under constant attack. Like an army of termites, destitute locals were motivated to sneak into protected territory to fish virgin rivers or poach valuable endangered species; loggers were tempted to bring down the huge kurana, cedar trees that could fetch thousands of dollars on the black market; and of course, the hordes of narcotraficantes stopping over on their way from southern Brazil to Central America were a constant and brutal menace.

Preserving the wilderness required unwavering attention.

With a nicotine-stained finger, Paulo pecked a key to activate Marvin, a computer program housed in a beige plastic box wedged under his desk. Acquired years ago from a joint research effort with an American graduate program, the battered box was unremarkable save for a faded printout of an old Simpsons cartoon character taped to the outside.

On the inside, however, Marvin housed a sophisticated neural network—an expert system that had been trained on thousands of square miles of real jungle imagery, and over a hundred million more simulated.

Marvin could reliably identify a quarter-mile airstrip hacked out of the remote jungle by drug couriers; or the logging roads that threaded like slug trails into the deep woods, with larger trees intentionally left unmolested as cover; or even the occasional maloca huts built by the uncontacted tribes—rare and intimate glimpses of another world.

Most importantly, the program could scan ten square miles of super-high-resolution terrain in seconds—a feat impossible for even the most dedicated human being.