Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Evolution

“But that’s not—” Sugarman stopped himself. “You mean to say …”

Every person in the room knew the purpose of this mission. Yet none of them had ever actually believed the strain would reappear. Not even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence. Except for one.

Hopper stood and addressed her incredulous staff, tucking the binder under her arm.

“Project Eternal Vigilance has just fulfilled her purpose. Our work here is done. I wish you well on your future assignments, whatever they may be.”

Colonel Hopper then turned and walked directly toward the high-priority communications room—a soundproofed closet, really. The analysts watched her go with their mouths open, speechless.

Over her shoulder, Hopper issued her final orders.

“Alert your colleagues at Peterson AFB and transfer those feeds. Based on an exponential rate of growth, tell them I estimate we’ve got less than four days.”

“Four days? Until what?” asked Sugarman.

“Until that anomaly spreads all the way to the ocean.”

And with that, Project Eternal Vigilance was complete.

RAND L. STERN WAS ALREADY DEAD TIRED, AND THE day had hardly begun. A four-star general with a sprawling family and a rocket-powered career, Stern faced a constant and overwhelming demand for his attention. For his own part, he was simply looking forward to eating lunch for fifteen uninterrupted minutes.

Stern was a compact African American man in his fifties and only now going gray at the temples. A top graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he had spent thousands of hours as a command pilot in an F-16 Fighting Falcon, hundreds of those in combat. Afterward, he had done a stint as a professor at West Point. And for the last three years, he had been in charge of the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), after his nomination was confirmed unanimously by the US Senate in 2016.

Stationed at Peterson Air Force Base in central Colorado, General Stern oversaw the activities of thirty-eight thousand individuals concerned with monitoring and protecting American interests in the area from two hundred to twenty-two thousand miles up, a volume of space dwarfing that of the entire planet. His annual budget was in the tens of billions, twice that of any existing multinational company.

If asked, he would respond that his most complex command assignment was the parenting of four preteen girls alongside his wife, a research scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver.

At home, Stern’s voice was only one among many. At work, however, he spoke for over three hundred million American citizens.

In his first-day briefing packet, Stern had been informed of twelve high-priority ongoing top-secret projects of extreme significance to national defense. Among them was something called Project Wildfire, created in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident of some fifty years before. Wildfire had seemed like an innocuous footnote compared to the ambitions of the Chinese and the astonishing amount of unaccounted-for nuclear material that had been lost in orbit. Yet during his tenure, no other project had been a bigger thorn in his side.

Dealing with the Andromeda microparticle had gone from a purely scientific undertaking to a secret arms race with the sort of global repercussions not encountered since the height of the Cold War. As a result, Project Wildfire had grown to consume a disproportionate amount of resources. It had become a gargantuan feat just to hide its dozens of subprojects from the public view, costing billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.

All of it weighed heavily on the general.

In a later interview, he described the job as “feeling like Atlas, crouched there alone, holding the planet in my arms—and nobody knows what I’m protecting them from or why. Not even my girls.”

Among the classified downstream projects, the existence of Eternal Vigilance was peripheral at best. Serious fear of another spontaneous mutation from the Andromeda microparticle had evaporated over time. Instead, what was most important were the possibilities of intentional weaponization by enemies of the state.

In typical human fashion, attention had turned away from the wondrous contemplation of extraterrestrials and settled squarely and mundanely on the countries (allies and not) who had inevitably learned about the deadly version of the microparticle called AS-1, and its plastic-eating cousin, AS-2.

Both varieties had proven to be dangerous in their own ways.

Upon inhalation, AS-1 was almost always immediately fatal. The relatively benign AS-2 variety, which had evolved spontaneously in the heart of the Wildfire laboratory, had shown itself capable of lingering in the upper atmosphere, turning most plastics into dust—a development that had set back the US space program by decades. It also made AS-2 samples freely available to any nation with the scientific acumen to go up and collect them.

No other varieties of Andromeda, natural or manufactured, had been detected—though not for lack of trying.

And now, the call Stern had been dreading for years had come from an utterly unexpected direction—not from his agents scrutinizing the China National Space Administration, or the spies sent to investigate disease outbreaks around the world, or even from a certain secret clean room still buried under a cornfield in Nevada.

The call had come from Eternal Vigilance.

Ensconced in his private office at Peterson Air Force Base, Stern had at first reacted to the emergency notification from Colonel Hopper with mild annoyance. Although false positives would normally be eliminated before reaching him, his assumption was that one had slipped through.

Dismissing an incongruous screensaver of kittens shooting rainbows from their mouths (a gift from his youngest daughter), the general accepted Hopper’s information push. As his screen flooded with images of the anomaly, he leaned back in his chair with fingers knotted over his stomach and closed his eyes in frustration.

“Colonel Hopper. What is this?” he asked.

“I have a theory.”

“You have a theory. I’m late for my lunch. Since the promotion, they’ve got my days regimented into ten-minute increments. There are only so many of these increments in one day. You are occupying one now. I would rather it be occupied by a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.”

“Yes, sir. Did you see the trajectory?”

“I see a static object in the jungle, Colonel. There is no trajectory.”

“On April tenth of this year, the Tiangong-1 Chinese space station fell into destructive reentry and disintegrated. That anomaly is perfectly equatorial, and directly in the debris trajectory of the fallen station. You may recall the incident was code-named Heavenly Palace.”

General Stern sat up abruptly.