Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Evolution

For the rare patient ones among us, the data-driven, those who are not afraid to delay gratification and save their dessert for last—these low-probability events aren’t inconceivable; they are inevitable.

Colonel Hopper was supremely patient, and as the world accelerated faster, she seemed to move more slowly. Indeed, she had been carefully selected by her predecessors for this particular ability.[fn1]

Fifteen years of toiling without reward or the promise of one, without encouragement, and often without even the respect of her colleagues—and Hopper had never once wavered in her commitment to the job.

And in this crucial moment, her persistence paid off in spectacular fashion.

COLONEL HOPPER FISHED out a thick binder from her top drawer and thumped it onto the desk. She was determined to make sure the rest of this encounter unfolded according to protocol. Using an old-fashioned letter opener, she tore through several seals to access the classified, laminated pages within. Although most emergency procedures were now automated, these instructions had been set down decades ago, and they called for a trained and capable human being to be in the loop every step of the way.

Pulling the headset mike closer to her lips, Hopper began issuing orders rapid-fire, with the certainty of an air-traffic controller.

“Brasiliero. Establish a thirty-mile circular quarantine zone with an epicenter at the anomaly. Pull that drone out of range immediately and land it at the perimeter. Once it’s down, don’t let anyone go near it.”

“Roger that, Vigilance One.”

Advanced computer models of the original Piedmont incident had indicated thirty miles as a minimum safe distance for airborne exposure. On screen, the real-time video shuddered and jerked as the Abutre-rei drone wheeled around and sped away in the other direction. After several seconds, the low-hanging nose camera had turned itself back one hundred and eighty degrees, and the anomaly reappeared on-screen, shrinking into the distance.

“Colonel, what does this thing have to do with us?” asked Sugarman in a quiet voice, his eyeglasses winking blue light from his workstation.

Hopper paused, then decided not to answer directly. Brasiliero’s earlier mention of the code name Heavenly Palace already represented a possible breach of classified information. Instead of responding, she moved to confirm the piece of information of most interest to Eternal Vigilance.

“Can you reconfirm that equatorial location?”

“It’s confirmed,” said Sugarman, hunching over his desk. “The anomaly is located on the exact equator, ma’am. Down to the centimeter, it looks like.”

Hopper took a deep, controlled breath. Aside from muted static, the room was utterly quiet. When Sugarman spoke, his voice was surprisingly loud.

“Why would an equatorial location matter?”

Hopper’s silence was jarring. The question could not be answered without compromising the security of the mission. It was information that could only travel up the chain of command, not down.

“Airman. Requisition the Transat Four satellite cluster, please. We need situational awareness on this, exquisite level.”

“Ma’am, that’s a collateral system. It’s being used by someone else. Currently logged for … CIA overseas usage—”

“You have my authorization to transmit Clear Eyes priority.”

Sugarman swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. We are seizing the satellite feed now.”

After a flurry of keypunches, an active satellite image blinked onto the front screens. It showed an infrared view of a jeep convoy speeding across dark desert terrain, leaving twin white tire tracks visible in the sand. Crisp black targeting crosshairs were overlaid on the image, above horizontal range lines.

From the in-room speakers, an unfamiliar and angry voice began to sputter, “Attention unidentified Clear Eyes permission. Get off this channel. You are currently interrupting a sensitive—”

“Rezone that eye to our coordinates,” said Hopper. “And mute that man.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The room fell back into silence, except for the frantic typing of the analysts, each focusing their laser-like attention on a few drops of the rolling tide of data pouring into their monitors from the trunk feed.

Somewhere above, on a classified orbital trajectory, the lens of a spy satellite adjusted silently in the vacuum of space. The image of the jeep convoy blurred and disappeared from the monitors. Seconds later, the eye settled onto a patch of the Amazon jungle, and the camera iris spiraled into crystal clarity.

Across the monitors hanging high at the front of the room, the anomaly appeared in complex detail—its metallic-looking surface beaded with droplets of jungle mist, faint hexagonal imprints etched into its skin, and the whole of it gleaming like a beetle’s waxy shell in the rising midday sun.

“Infrared,” said Hopper.

On the second monitor, the image appeared in gray scale, with lighter pixels indicating hotter surface temperatures. The image of the surrounding jungle canopy dissolved into a grayish mass of what looked like storm clouds. The anomaly itself was pure white now, so bright it briefly washed out the rest of the image.

“It’s hot, ma’am. Really hot,” said an analyst. “See how the nearby vegetation is curling back?”

Hopper nodded, pointing at the monitor. “What are those faint speckles? All of them seem to be the same temperature, but cooling fast.”

At his desk, Sugarman put his face close to his dedicated feed. He spoke briefly into his headset to another analyst. Finally, he responded.

“We believe those are dead bodies, ma’am. About fourteen of them. Human.”

“You can’t possibly confirm that, Airman. Plenty of large primates live in that area of the world.”

“Some of them are carrying spears, ma’am.”

Hopper was silent for a moment.

“I see,” she said.

On screen, the thermal image flashed to white, saturating the sensor and washing out the screen. As the exposure slowly returned to normal, the anomaly seemed different. The fading specks were now closer to it.

“What was that?” asked Hopper.

“I … it appears to be growing,” responded Sugarman. “And there’s something new emerging from the middle of the lake. A smaller, six-sided structure.”

The third monitor lit up with splotches of color. A hazy cloud of blue and orange appeared in the atmosphere above the anomaly. It seemed to be drifting east on a slight wind current.

“We’ve got an ash cloud,” said another analyst. “The atmosphere down there is soaked with it. It must have been ejected from the anomaly somehow. More readings incoming …”

The colonel drew a finger down a column of figures on the top-secret laminated binder page. The vital information had been laid down as simply as a child’s book report, created with the age-old maxim of K.I.S.S.—“Keep it simple, stupid”—in mind.

Her finger stopped at a mass spectrum graph. There was a tremor in her voice as she issued her next command:

“Get the mass spec readings from the drone.”

“Already on it, ma’am.”

Seconds later, a junior analyst slid a mass spectrograph onto the colonel’s desk.

Once again, Hopper ran a finger across the laminated sheet. When she stopped and looked up, the tremor in her voice was gone.

“We have positive ID,” she said.

“Of what?” asked Sugarman, pivoting to face his boss. His lips were pale, voice dry and on the verge of cracking. Behind him, the entire room of analysts had turned to watch Hopper, solemn in their fear.

“The signature peaks are an almost exact match,” she replied, “to the Andromeda Strain recovered in Piedmont, Arizona, over fifty years ago. Somehow, something made of a similar substance is down in that jungle right now. And based on the visuals, it’s getting bigger. Those bodies are almost underneath it.”