Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Evolution

TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT MILES ABOVE EARTH, Dr. Sophie Kline floated quietly in a nimbus of her own long blond hair. It was just after 6:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time—the official time zone of the International Space Station, as a compromise to accommodate Mission Control in both Houston and Moscow—but her blue-gray eyes were wide open and alert. This early, both of her fellow astronauts were still in sleep cycle, and the observation cupola was shuttered, empty, and dark—the only sound a faint whirring from the Tranquility module ventilation systems.

It was Kline’s favorite time of day.

She punched a glowing button, and the hull began to whine as the exterior cupola shutters rose. The gentle glow of Earth’s surface lit the interior of the module, and Kline enjoyed the usual thrill in her stomach. She loved the feeling of being alone and suspended, looking down on the planet from on high. It gave her a sense of utter superiority, as if everything below were a part of her own creation.

This small daily ritual (confessed in a personal flight journal salvaged after the incident) might seem arrogant, but it was simply a dream of freedom.

As it was, Kline was floating in the windowed cupola with her paralyzed legs bound tightly together with Velcro straps to keep them out of the way. It was only in these quiet moments of weightlessness that she could almost forget the searing cramps and spasms that writhed through her devastated muscles.

Sophie Kline had not been able to walk since she was six years old, so she had chosen to fly. She was tall, despite her disability, and as she focused on the cupola window, her striking eyebrows and gaunt cheeks lent her a predatory appearance, softened only by a smattering of freckles across her nose and forehead.

Her path to the stars was so unlikely as to almost satisfy Borel’s fallacy. When Kline fell and broke her right arm at the age of four, her parents assumed she was simply clumsy or unlucky. Only one was true. At the hospital, an attentive pediatrician noticed that the little girl had a concerning tremor.

The incredibly unlikely juvenile amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (JALS) diagnosis came at the age of five, with the degenerative disease attacking her relatively newfound ability to walk. Sophie began her life in a wheelchair, though she had no intention of ending it there. With an almost inhuman resolve, particularly for a child, she had set her ingenious mind and iron will to escaping the bounds of gravity.

She had succeeded.

Every reputable doctor had predicted she would be dead by the age of twelve. Instead, she had persevered, taking advantage of each new medical advance, and eventually become a world-renowned scientist and an American astronaut.

Kline found that the chronic pain in her muscles nearly disappeared in microgravity, and her wasted body wasn’t a disadvantage the way it was on earth. In constant free fall, she was as physically capable as any astronaut. More capable, in fact, since she did not have to worry about the muscle-wasting effects of weightlessness.

Thus, using only her arms, Kline turned her body to face the circular porthole in the center of the viewing cupola. Six trapezoidal panes of glass splayed radially out from it—the largest window ever put to use in outer space. Beyond, the face of the planet slid past, surprisingly close. Today, she saw an endless jungle vista—a dense landscape of treetops twined with gleaming rivers that looked to Sophie like the wriggling trace of neurons.

It was a view that absolutely should not have been there, and the sight of it indicated that a serious emergency had occurred during sleep cycle.

Internal ISS video footage showed Sophie Kline muttering in disbelief, frantically scanning the computer monitors ringing the neck of the cupola. Physiological monitoring logs reported her heart rate elevating as she took hold of two slender blue handrails and pulled her face to within inches of the central porthole. The terrain scrolling past below would have been utterly unfamiliar to the seasoned astronaut.

Like the other two crew members on board the ISS, Kline’s body was instrumented with wireless physiological sensors. Unlike her crewmates’, however, Kline’s monitoring extended further—at one-second intervals, her mind was being read. As a teenager, Kline had been implanted with a Kinetics-V brain-computer interface (BCI) at her own insistence, so she could continue her college courses via computer as the disease progressed through her nervous system.

The BCI device was a golden mesh of thousands of wires, soaked in a biocompatible coating to prevent foreign body rejection, and sunk into the jelly-like surface of Kline’s motor cortex. Upgradable via radio, the current software iteration employed a deep-learning algorithm to map the electrical activity of neurons in Sophie’s brain to actions in the real world. The unique interface linked Kline mentally to the ISS computer systems—an almost telepathic connection.

Kline realized that the ISS had undergone a severe trajectory change. Such an event could only signal imminent disaster, and it should have been a cause for panic. Indeed, her outward reaction to the unexpected terrain had been consistent with surprise and shock. However, routine monitoring of her brain implant’s data stream showed that Kline’s predominant state of mind was an alpha brain wave varying between 7 and 13 Hz—a state of nonarousal, relaxed alertness in the face of mortal danger.

It was a small discrepancy that would go unnoticed until much later.

Kline opened a comm channel to Houston flight control and requested information from CAPCOM.

The initial response was static.

A lot had happened during the astronauts’ sleep period, beginning at precisely 23:35:10 UTC when, under the auspices of General Rand L. Stern, the USSTRATCOM Command Center issued an emergency notification to ISS Mission Control in Houston.

USSTRATCOM advised of a likely close approach of the ISS to multiple red threshold objects. Such notifications were fairly common, as the command center is tasked with monitoring any object in low orbit with a diameter larger than one and a half inches.

Officially, the debris source was attributed to a failed NSA satellite deployment, but console operators at Houston were backchannel notified that the orbital debris was in actuality the aftermath of a classified antisatellite weapons (ASAT) attack performed against China by Russia.

In public, these space warfare operations were universally condemned for scattering dangerous space junk in low Earth orbit. Yet it was an open secret that since the 1960s every spacefaring nation had been enthusiastically experimenting with ASAT platforms—from simple kinetic kill warheads to more sophisticated reusable approaches deploying shaped-charge explosives.

The attitude determination and control (ADCO) officer, at Mission Control, Vandi Chawla ran a simulation on the USSTRATCOM-supplied data and confirmed the high likelihood of a conjunction in the orbital pathway. Because they were red threshold objects, not yellow, there was no debate about the primary response. She immediately authorized an emergency debris avoidance maneuver (EDAM), even though the orbital modification would result in several missed launch opportunities over the next months, none of them critical resupplies.