The Andromeda Evolution Page 13

  Yes.

  Do you remember how to get back there?

  ( . . . ) Yes.

  [side conversation]

  STONE

  If there were stone flakes at his camp, they’re probably all infected. He could be the only survivor.

  VEDALA

  Ethically, we can’t further expose him to Andromeda. And he obviously doesn’t have Wildfire clearance. We can’t bring him.

  STONE

  [snorts] That anomaly is sitting in the equivalent of his living room. This isn’t even a choice, it’s our responsibility. He’s only a boy. We have to protect him.

  VEDALA

  It is a choice. His. We’ll let him decide whether to join us, or to stay out here on his own and look for his people.

  ( . . . )

  STONE

  Fine, Nidhi.

  VEDALA

  Don’t forget, James—this jungle is his home. This is where he belongs. To assume we can save him from his own home is pure arrogance.

  STONE

  No. This was his home ( . . . ) until Andromeda took it from him. It’s taken his family, too. Now, this little boy doesn’t belong anywhere.

  [end side conversation]

  Tupa, you aren’t safe here. These men and women are your friends. They need your help. But it is your choice, if you want to go with them or not. Do you want to stay here, away from the danger? Or will you lead them to the black mountain that spits smoke? Will you help them fight this evil?

  ( . . . )

  [end transcript]

  * * *

  As he listened to the last of the canary drone’s questions, Tupa sat and watched the jungle for a long moment. He ran his fingers across the blowgun, thinking. Overhead, insects flickered through rare shafts of sunlight that streamed through the chattering canopy high above.

  Finally, Tupa looked past the hovering canary drone and at the Wildfire team. Focusing directly on James Stone, the boy touched his chest. Eyes never wavering, he spoke quickly to the canary.

  A half second later, the laptop quietly articulated a translation.

  “What is your name?”

  A look of relief spread over Stone’s face. Standing up on legs numb from sitting, he took an awkward step forward. He touched his own chest, voice breaking with emotion as he said his first words to the boy.

  “James,” he said. “I am James. Good to meet you, Tupa.”

  Watching the two of them approach each other, man and boy, Vedala frowned. She had registered a note of true feeling in Stone’s voice. The roboticist seemed deeply sensitive to the fate of this young survivor. It was unexpected, coming from a childless bachelor. The raw emotion she saw on Stone’s face in this moment would continue to haunt her for the remainder of the mission.

  Plan B

  FLIPPING AN INDUSTRIAL-GRADE LIGHT SWITCH, GENERAL Rand Stern watched as bank after bank of fluorescent lights kicked on, illuminating the massive sweep of the Ambrose High Bay laboratory, a stadium-size area buried under a half mile of solid granite known as Cheyenne Mountain.

  The Cheyenne Mountain Complex had housed the command center for NORAD before operations moved to Peterson AFB. For the last decade it had been placed on warm standby, staffed only when necessary. The entire five-acre underground complex was now manned by a skeleton crew.

  But this afternoon, Stern wasn’t interested in its human occupants.

  Stern proceeded alone, walking in the shadow of a towering equipment rack on his left. He fought the urge to shiver under the loud and constant breeze of the air conditioning. His boots clanged on a strip of metal grating laid into concrete. Beneath the latticework, he could see thick braids of cable snaking off toward self-contained laboratory pods lining the right side of the corridor. Each pod housed some form of robot.

  The buzzing fluorescents had been illuminated specifically for Stern.

  Few of these machines required light to run their repetitive trials. It gave the general a slightly nauseous feeling to think of them down here in the cavernous darkness, complex tools thrashing about endlessly without human supervision.

  Stepping onto solid concrete painted with yellow safety lines, Stern stopped before a glass and metal cage. It had always reminded him of a zoo exhibit—the type designed to contain dangerous predators. Indeed, the modified BSL-4 enclosure was designed to contain incredibly dangerous organisms—although usually microscopic in size.

  Beyond triple-paned glass, a twin iteration of the ISS-based Robonaut R3A4 was awkwardly conducting an experiment. It was oblivious to the general, moving in slow, jerky motions. Stern tapped the touch monitor hanging outside the cage, and it flickered on. The display indicated that the current telepresence occupant in control of the robot was a student. Data was being piped in from Australia on a feed owned by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

  Swiping a key card, Stern tapped in a code and peered into a camera to offer biometric confirmation of his identity. The feed to Australia immediately cut off. Without any commands, the Robonaut returned to a default posture. Turning to face Stern, it squared its shoulders and stared blankly ahead.

  After tapping a contact number into the monitor, Stern clasped his hands behind his back and rocked onto his heels. Waiting, he watched as a satellite uplink was established with the International Space Station. Stern was growing anxious about the mission, particularly the fact that Kline hadn’t been more helpful, and he was hoping to use this opportunity to see what she would say off the record.

  The robot remained as still as a statue.

  With telepresence-enabled applications, Stern had always found the moment of animation to be fascinating. Watching a remote human being take control of a robot was like seeing a soul inhabit a body. Yet after a few moments of waiting, he began to feel uneasy. The connection was already made, but nothing was happening. Something must have gone wrong.

  And then Stern realized that the Robonaut was watching him.

  Dr. Kline was so adept at inhabiting these machines, her control of them so smooth and natural, that she had given no outward indication that she was occupying the Robonaut’s body. Only something in its expressionless camera eyes, some hint of awareness, had triggered a surge of animal adrenaline in Stern.

  “Kline,” he said roughly, ignoring the spooky gaze of the subterranean robot.

  “General Stern,” replied the low, husky voice of Sophie Kline.

  Her words had been transmitted securely from the International Space Station and out of a speaker embedded in the exterior of the enclosure. Each syllable seemed to slither into the metallic depths of the empty high bay laboratory. Stern had to remind himself that he wasn’t talking to an actual robot, just a robotically determined woman currently residing in a free-falling capsule some three hundred miles over his head.

  On the ISS, Kline was wearing her head-mounted display and gloves, able to control this Robonaut as easily as any other.

  “Why are you contacting me this way?” she asked.

  “Security,” responded Stern. “Unlike everything else up there, your telepresence data is encrypted and transmitted as machine instruction. The other voice and data lines are encrypted, but well, you know the Russians.”

  The robot nodded, an uncannily human movement that Stern found disconcerting.

  “Go on,” said Kline.

  Clasping his hands tighter, Stern continued.

  “The Wildfire team has missed its noon rendezvous. Since you spoke to them, we’ve had no contact.”

  “They’re only overdue by a few hours.”

  “Nevertheless, we are putting alternate plans in motion.”

  “We?”

  Stern ignored the question.

  “Containment, Kline. A spire has grown half a mile out of the lake, straight up, and the main structure has more than doubled in size. We are moving to suppress the anomaly before it grows any larger. There are several routes along which we could choose to proceed. Some are more . . . egregious than others.”
<
br />   “You do recall the first Andromeda incident? If you go nuclear, the strain will only feed on the energy. You’ll turn a bad situation into hell on earth.”

  “We’re the military. We remember everything. For instance, we remember how the Russians defeated Napoleon and his Grande Armée after he invaded Moscow in 1812 with overwhelming force.”

  The robot was silent. It stared into Stern’s eyes without expression. Stern blinked first, necessarily.

  “They burned everything, Dr. Kline,” he continued, voice dropping. “They destroyed their own homes to starve out the enemy. Without shelter, the French troops froze. Without anything to eat, they starved.”

  “And so did the Russian peasants,” replied Kline. “General, can I assume you are proposing a scorched-earth policy? You mean to burn everything near the anomaly, salt the earth with some form of that Andromeda inhibitor solution, and then push the circle inward and repeat.”

  “You catch on quickly,” replied Stern. “Believe it or not, the US Air Force still makes napalm. It works just as well as it ever did.”

  “There are people living there, tribes, each of them a civilization unto itself,” replied Kline. “Not to mention that our own team is probably still alive. And you want to decimate the entire area?”

  “I don’t want to do this. I have to. Unless there is another way.”

  “Is this an international decision? Are all nations in agreement?”

  “This is a unilateral decision that was made more than fifty years ago, when the fail-safe protocols were written in the aftermath of the first Andromeda incident. It transcends nationhood. It’s a hard rule, made in hard times, to secure the future of humankind at any cost.”

  “Which part of humankind? This will mean the extinction of an unknown number of indigenous cultures with whom we’ve intentionally never made contact. What are their lives worth to you?”

  “I wish I were here to argue ethics, Dr. Kline. But I’m not. I am here for your expertise. This is our last chance. Do you see another way to contain the Andromeda Strain?”

  Drawing itself up to its full height, the R3A4 trained its two camera lenses on General Stern and regarded him silently. The military man found the gaze of the machine unnerving, but he did not turn away.

  “The best way to contain it,” said Kline, “is to leave it alone. Give the Wildfire team another twenty-four hours. Have faith that they’re still alive.”

  General Stern let the air out of his lungs slowly.

  “I will take that under advisement,” he replied.

  The Anomaly

  THE WORLD HAD GONE DIM AND CLAUSTROPHOBIC under a seemingly endless ceiling of foliage. Loaded with the extra baggage formerly carried by Matis porters, the Wildfire field team struggled to follow the fleet-footed Tupa. The boy was tracing a path alongside the muddy tangles of a rapidly drying riverbed—or the “river’s corpse,” as the canary translated.

  Tupa’s route could not be found on any map, though he led them with the certainty of someone walking across his own town. For nearly eight hours, he had been marching confidently ahead through muted sunlight, accompanied by a whirring swarm of canary drones. The rest of the team stumbled along, machetes flashing as they tried to keep their footing on the spongy edges of the riverbed. Around them, the monolithic columns of tree trunks soared, blocking out the sky. Over the hours, red mud had coated their boots and khaki pants, spatters and smears that soon took on the gruesome appearance of dried blood.

  The team did not speak much during the journey, moving too fast for conversation. Their moist, sucking footsteps and the brush of leaves over their legs were punctuated by the occasional splintering crash of a far-off tree falling or the gurgle of water flowing around some half-submerged obstacle.

  Odhiambo observed the yellowish water with concern. In the recent past, the river had clearly been much higher. The exposed roots of trees lining the banks were still drying out. Odhiambo was at a loss to understand what had happened. The river seemed to have just disappeared.

  It was yet another mystery, among many.

  All seemed still and calm in the failing light of day when, unheralded, the jungle broke. There was nothing obvious or momentous to signify the end of their journey. In fact, it was just the opposite.

  Peng Wu saw it first.

  Maneuvering around the roots of a vine-encrusted wimba tree the size of a fifteen-story building, Peng stepped into what looked like a sudden nightfall. Her machete, which had been in constant motion, wavered in the air with nothing left to slice. Looking to her left and right, she saw a crush of plants, trees, and vines that curled away from a monstrous shadow.

  The team had reached the anomaly.

  Peng blinked at the emptiness before her, mouth open in wonder. For a moment, she felt as if she were back in orbit within the Tiangong-1, staring into the reeling infinity of space. She turned and saw Tupa watching her with a mixture of fear and curiosity. Snapping her mouth shut, Peng dropped the expression of wonder from her face.

  Seconds later, the three other scientists stumbled to a stop at Peng’s side. All were silent as they gazed at the featureless skin of the anomaly.

  The structure was darkly menacing. Its color was the black, green, and purple of solar panels, almost oily, reflecting the sporadic sunlight in greasy rainbows. At its base, the structure seemed to have cratered into the ground, leaving waves in the dirt like a rumpled skirt, and a not unpleasant raw-earth smell.

  And rising beyond it, barely visible through the upper foliage, was the stark silhouette of a narrow six-sided column. It had risen higher than anyone could believe was possible, like a seam in the sky. Its purpose was utterly inscrutable, and Odhiambo later mused that it reminded him of the spiky crystalline growths found in deep cave systems.

  “My god,” someone murmured, but otherwise the scientists were silent as they finally observed the reason for this mission in person.

  James Stone rested his hands on his knees, steadying himself. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his temples, his vision quivering with each beat of his heart. The sight ahead had sparked an instinctive fear that coursed through his body with the fire of pure adrenaline—a fear of something impossible, yet haunting and too familiar. Stone couldn’t help thinking of his recurring dream.

  In the diseased vicinity of the structure, he thought he could glimpse the ruby sparkle of congealed blood. The dirt at his feet resembled granules of dried plasma. Stone could feel a fetidly hot breeze coming off the anomaly, sending grains of dust airborne—like a stream of blood evaporating on desert sand.

  Stone sensed Vedala standing at his elbow. She was holding out the satellite phone in one hand. He scrambled to check his environmental monitoring.

  “I’m not detecting any toxins. The ash must have settled. What now?” Stone asked, swallowing with difficulty.

  “Our clearing is gone,” Vedala said matter-of-factly. “The anomaly must have grown since we set out. We’ve got no line of sight to the communications satellites.”

  She craned her neck, spying only a narrow slit of blue sky between the towering face of the anomaly and a wild confusion of jungle that crept to the very edge of it. She stood with the satellite radio in both hands, holding it like a baby. The phone had been fitted with a black antenna shaped like a tongue depressor. The connection bars sat flat and dark.

  Tupa watched from beyond the tree line, highly entertained by Vedala’s gesticulations. The rest of the field team was not so amused, as her worried expression clearly telegraphed the danger they were in.

  “Is this really our only approach? It isn’t going to work,” said Stone.

  Vedala replied, not looking away, “It’s an Iridium phone. Coverage is provided by over sixty satellites on polar orbits a couple hundred miles up. It’s always shifting, so there’s still a chance we’ll hit a connection.”

  “And if we don’t?” asked Stone.

  Stopping, Vedala turned to the group.

  “If we don�
��t rendezvous, they’ll assume we’re dead. And if they believe we’re dead . . . they’ll move on to contingency plans.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “It is not good,” said Peng Wu. “The military instinct will be to wipe out the entire area. Purge it completely, and us with it.”

  The team was now past rendezvous by over five hours.

  Peng Wu threw her pack on the ground beside the anomaly. She hastily extracted hard-copy topographic maps of the surrounding area. Head down, eyes trained on the data, she said, “Nidhi is right. Everything has changed. Mainly, this thing is a lot bigger than it was when we first set out.”

  “Haiya,” exclaimed Odhiambo in his native tongue. “How can that be? I see no evidence of construction. It’s not as if this thing is alive.”

  “Okay, we can start with a canary survey—” began Stone, before Odhiambo shushed him with a wave of his hand.

  “No, wait,” said Odhiambo. “Listen to that.”

  The twisted, curled branches and dried leaves around them had begun to rattle. A mass of warm air was cascading up the face of the anomaly and brushing against the tree line.

  “Strange. There is rarely wind beneath the canopy,” said Odhiambo.

  “The anomaly is tall. It must be channeling a breeze,” offered Vedala.

  “Not likely,” said Odhiambo. “This air is moving upward.”

  Tupa whimpered and backed away, his dark hair fluttering in the rising rush of wind. A deep, subterranean groan was emanating from the dirt beneath their feet. The scientists put their arms out for balance in the quaking jungle, shooting terrified glances at each other.

  Stone glanced at the feed from a canary drone on the monitor hanging around his neck, switching from visible light to infrared. The face of the anomaly erupted into blazing white light.

  “Move away!” shouted Stone, stepping back. “It’s heating up fast!”

  “What is this?” cried Peng. She stood near the wall, machete clenched in her fist. Her long black hair flew in the whirlwind of air rushing upward. “What’s happening to it?”