Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Evolution

Paulo could run his fingertips over the roof of the jungle and feel whether an unclassified data sample was the ragged, chain-sawed destruction of an airstrip or the smooth banks of an innocent new river tributary.

Eyes closed, limp cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Paulo slouched, his face to the ceiling. His outstretched hands traced the surface of the jungle as if he were a blind god touching the face of the planet.

When his questing fingers found the hard, unnatural lines of the … thing, Paulo Araña swallowed a low moan in the back of his throat. Whatever it was, it really did exist. But there were no roads nearby. No sign of construction. It could not be possible—out there alone and colossal among the primordial trees—and yet it was as real as touching the stubble on his own face.

The thing in the jungle rose at least a hundred feet above a skirt of raw wilderness, long and slightly curved, like a barricade. It spoiled the sanctity of a rain forest otherwise unbroken for thousands of square miles. And it seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

Around the perimeter of the structure, Paulo could feel a crumbling sensation. It was the texture of death—thousands of virgin trees collapsed and sick. This thing was a kind of pestilence, polluting everything nearby.

For a long moment, Paulo sat and contemplated raising an alert on the antiquated FUNAI-issued shortwave radio sitting on his desk. His eyes lingered on its silver dials as the generator puttered outside, providing the trickle of electricity necessary to connect this isolated shack to the rest of the world.

Pushing away from the desk, Paulo felt blindly under the drawers until his fingers brushed against a business card taped beneath. It contained the phone number of a young American who had recently contacted Paulo.

Claiming to be a businessman, the man had explained that a Chinese aircraft had recently been lost over this territory. His company was willing to pay a hefty price for information about it. Paulo had assumed (and continued to assume) that the American was looking for pieces of airplane wreckage, although he hadn’t said that. Not exactly. Instead, the man had said specifically to report “anything strange.”

And this was definitely that.

Using his palms to wipe away the sheen of sweat that soaked his face like tears, Paulo stared at the business card and punched a number on his desk phone.

A man with an American accent answered on the first ring.

“I’m glad you called, Mr. Araña,” said the voice. “I was right to trust you.”

“You already know?” Paulo asked, glancing at the computer screen.

“Marvin rang me just now, when you registered the anomalous classification,” said the voice. “He’s smarter than he looks.”

The Americans and their trickery. It never ceased to amaze Paulo. A people who seemed so trusting and forthright—all smiles … and yet.

“What now?” asked Paulo.

“You can relax, Mr. Araña. We’ve got people taking care of it. You’ll be well compensated for your assistance. But I am curious,” asked the voice. “What do you think it is?”

“I know it is not an error, senhor. It’s really out there. I have touched it.”

“Well, then?”

Paulo thought for a moment before answering. “It is a plague. Killing everything it touches. But I can never know what it is.”

“And why is that?”

“Because that thing out there … it was not built by any human hands.”

NEARLY FIVE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, NEAR TACOMA, Washington, Colonel Stacy Hopper was arriving to a quiet morning shift at Fairchild Air Force Base. A skeleton crew of intelligence analysts who had worked overnight were just clocking out, leaving behind dimmed monitors on neat desks and a meager work log indicating that, as usual, nothing much had happened.

Crisply uniformed in her air force blues, complete with a service cap, tie tab fastened neatly around her neck, and sensible black hosiery, Hopper eyed the windowless control room. A thermos of coffee rested in the crook of her arm. Her morning crew of eight uniformed intelligence analysts were settling into their consoles, saying their good mornings, and slipping on headsets. Many of them had damp shoulders, having just arrived to work on another rainy morning in the Pacific Northwest.

Hopper sat down at her own console at the back of the room, enjoying the soft murmuring of her analysts’ voices. Glancing up at the telemetry monitors lining the front wall, she saw nothing out of the ordinary—just the way she liked it.

It was said by her colleagues (in private) that Hopper, a calm, gray-eyed woman, had the patience of a land mine. In fact, she was perfectly satisfied with the slow pace of this job. She was the third acting commander of the project. Both of her predecessors had devoted the entirety of their careers to this post. As far as Hopper was concerned, it would be perfectly fine if Project Eternal Vigilance lived up to its name.

By the account of her longest-serving analysts, Hopper was fond of the rather pedantic saying “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

It was a sentiment that had begun to go stale among her staff.

This low morale was ironic, considering that at its inception, Project Eternal Vigilance had been considered the prime posting within all armed forces, and every roster spot vigorously competed for (by those with the security clearance to even know of it).

The project had been spawned in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident—a weapons research program gone horribly wrong, detailed in the publication popularly known as The Andromeda Strain .

In the late 1960s, the US Air Force deployed a series of high-altitude unmanned craft to search for weaponizable microparticles in the upper atmosphere. In February 1967, the Scoop VII platform proceeded to find exactly what the military men were looking for, except that the original Andromeda Strain was far more virulent than anyone could have guessed.

Before it could be retrieved by military personnel, the recovery capsule was compromised by overly curious civilians. The microparticle proceeded to infect and gruesomely wipe out the entire forty-eight-person population of the town of Piedmont, Arizona—save for an old man and a newborn baby. These surviving subjects were discovered and rescued by the acclaimed bacteriologist Dr. Jeremy Stone and the pathologist Dr. Charles Burton. The two survivors were isolated for study in an underground cleanroom laboratory, code-named Wildfire. Their fates were eventually classified to protect their privacy.

It was in Wildfire that a team of eminent scientists, hand selected for this situation, raced to study the exotic microparticle later dubbed AS-1; they found that it was one micron in size, transmitted by inhalation in the air, and caused death by near-instantaneous coagulation of the blood. And although its microscopic six-sided structure and lack of amino acids indicated it was nonbiological, AS-1 proved capable of self-replicating—and mutating.