The Andromeda Evolution Page 16

  BY 11:03:24 UTC, the Wildfire field team was assembled at the mouth of the anomaly. They were watched from a distance by a wary Tupa. Respirators hung around their necks, and they wore headlamps on their foreheads. The team had reapplied the last of the inhibitor across their clothing and skin.

  They were as prepared as they could be.

  “All right,” said Vedala. “I want everyone to march in single file. We’re going to move slowly. If you see something, say something. Stone’s canaries are going in first, so we’ll have a map to work from. Slow and steady. No surprises.”

  The river murmured quietly in the background as Vedala added, “Remember, a certain someone doesn’t want us here. Which is exactly why we’ve got to investigate.”

  “Deploying canaries,” replied Stone, gesturing to the drones as they flitted one at a time into the tunnel. Turning to look into the forest, he added, “I just need a moment.”

  Stone tilted his head toward Tupa, who squatted on a nearby log with the blowgun across his knees. The boy hadn’t left Stone’s side since they’d made first contact, and his unhappiness now was not concealed. However, it had been decided that the safest scenario was for Tupa to wait outside for their return.

  Vedala watched as Stone approached the boy with a smile and confident words. Asked to stay behind, Tupa was looking away from Stone with the distinct sheen of tears in his eyes.

  Vedala couldn’t suppress a sad smile.

  Harold Odhiambo strode to the threshold of the tunnel, leaning inside with bright, curious eyes. For the xenogeologist, this was the realization of a literal childhood dream. The black tunnel had begun to blink with light as the canary drones illuminated their LEDs, flickering like fireflies into the dark throat.

  Beside Odhiambo, Peng Wu was struggling not to hyperventilate. Sensing the onset of a panic attack, she was in the process of employing a deep-breathing routine taught in the taikonaut basic training regimen.

  Odhiambo spoke to her in a calm tone, without any trace of judgment.

  “Whatever is in there, Major Wu . . . we have no reason to believe it is hostile. Theoretically, this entire structure could be no more than an expression of a microparticle that doesn’t know we exist. It is a natural wonder. Something ancient, possibly even from another star system . . . but here now entirely by accident.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Peng. “Not for sure.”

  “No, I suppose we don’t. But Andromeda has never been found outside our own upper atmosphere. It is unique to our planet, some strange accident of evolution . . . unless you know something I don’t?”

  Their eyes met, and Peng almost began to speak before stopping.

  “A prerequisite of information sharing is trust, Dr. Odhiambo. And I’m afraid there isn’t enough of it going around.”

  Odhiambo noticed that Peng was staring coldly over his shoulder. Nidhi Vedala stood nearby, listening to the conversation. She seemed tense, her eyes sharp and calculating. When she spoke, there was a harsh edge to her voice.

  “If you’re aware of any danger to my team,” said Vedala in a low voice, “now is the time to divulge it.”

  “I . . .” began Peng, before her mouth snapped shut. “I am not.”

  Odhiambo frowned. It seemed as if an opportunity for cooperation had just passed them by. Unfortunately, it was a chance that wouldn’t come again.

  Peng continued, “Regardless, I do see good reason to listen to Dr. Kline. She has the most intimate understanding of the microparticle. And she warned us not to proceed for a reason.”

  “Her warnings weren’t backed up by evidence,” countered Vedala. “And her judgment can’t be trusted, for obvious reasons. Why are you so afraid?”

  In response, Peng Wu said something very odd.

  “I have . . . an intuition.”*

  The very mention of the word intuition caused Vedala to blanch. She was behaving as most scientists were trained to—immediately discounting the results of an emotion, a feeling, not backed up by solid evidence.

  She chose her next words carefully. Everyone knew that the loitering canaries would be recording this exchange.

  “Our field team has a job to do, Major Wu. We are to enter and investigate the anomalous structure. Those are still our orders. If you wish to defy them, you may, but you do so with full knowledge of the repercussions.”

  Peng’s machete was still in her hand, fingers flexed tightly over the grip. Each beat of her heart sent her arm quaking. She appeared to be experiencing hyperarousal, better known as the fight-or-flight response.

  “I’ll elucidate,” Vedala added, stepping closer. “Since you are military personnel, you will likely be discharged. As a civilian, you will be prosecuted. Your career will be over. Possibly you’ll lose your freedom, although I’m not overly familiar with the workings of the People’s Republic military judicial system. I will assume they don’t celebrate cowardice.”

  Peng nodded, shoulders slumping. She looked at the machete in her hand and forced herself to drop it to the jungle floor. Satisfied, Vedala turned sharply and moved to collect Stone from his goodbyes with Tupa.

  Harold Odhiambo put a comforting hand on Peng’s shoulder. He leaned in with excitement dancing in his eyes.

  “Try and remember,” he said, stepping over the threshold and into the tunnel mouth. “This is a scientific adventure.”

  Peng nodded without much enthusiasm, following Odhiambo into the structure.

  Vedala followed a few seconds later.

  Stone was the last to enter. At the opening, he turned to wave goodbye to Tupa. The boy was now sitting on his heels, perched on a hard-case full of extra food and supplies. He waved back listlessly. It had taken the last five minutes of arguing via the translating canary to fully convince the boy to stay behind.

  The featureless black tunnel swallowed Stone quickly. The lights of the teams’ headlamps danced on smooth walls. Deeper inside, the fluttering canary drones twinkled like distant stars.

  Tupa, left alone in the hot, silent clearing, watched until the last flicker of light disappeared.

  He paused for about thirty seconds and then hastily hopped off the hard-case and popped it open. Inside, he dug out an inhibitor-soaked shirt Stone had left behind. Shrugging on this “armor,” he pulled a spare respirator over his head and wrapped the band of a headlamp around his fingers, dimming the bright light with his clenched fist.

  At the entrance, he paused to pick up Peng’s abandoned machete. Taking a last deep breath, he stepped across the threshold in pursuit of his friends.

  The steel blade flashed once as the boy loped away into darkness.

  Primary Descent

  ONE AT A TIME, THE FIELD TEAM STEPPED INTO THE suffocating blackness. Coated in layers of inhibitor spray, each member wore long pants and sleeves, bright purple exam gloves, and a wing-shaped respirator tucked over nose and mouth. Four headlamps bobbed in the clear, hot air. Four sets of boots thumped off the hard flat ground, sending echoes racing up and down the seemingly endless corridor.

  Ahead, the shifting swarm of canary drones flickered and hummed, their ultra-bright LEDs shining like dewdrops suspended in subterranean spiderwebs. The intense light reflected in unpredictable ways against the oily greenish walls—sometimes shimmering brightly, and other times absorbed into a flat blackness. When the milling drones passed near the scientists, their rotors sent down columns of hot, metallic-smelling air.

  The team walked in silence, tense and wary, stretching their senses to the limit of perception.

  “No airborne toxins, environment is still clean,” murmured Stone every few minutes.

  “I’m seeing a lot of residue,” said Vedala, looking at Peng’s bootprints as they appeared in a thin layer of damp ash.

  “Yes, but no particulates in the air,” said Stone.

  “Even so, respirators stay on,” said Vedala.

  Every fifty yards, Odhiambo produced a small greenish-yellow tube from his hip satchel. As he cracked each
one in his gnarled fingers, the tubes erupted into an ethereal emerald light. Dropping them on the ground, he left a trail of visual markers behind them—an indication of both elevation and the way out.

  The tunnel cut straight into the structure, descending at a slow, nearly imperceptible grade. The walls remained featureless, made of the same uniform substance, its surface seeming to waver like the dark-green glass of an old Coke bottle. The faint hexagon of daylight at the entrance was soon lost to view as the team steadily descended.

  Stone provided rearguard, his stubbled face lit from below by the glow of his neck monitor. The hanging screen projected a rapidly expanding map constructed in real time by the canary swarm. So far it had depicted a very simple straight line, cutting into the anomaly for at least a quarter mile.

  After approximately twenty minutes of slow progress, Vedala called a huddle.

  “Status report?” she asked Stone.

  “The corridor slopes down at a constant angle. It hasn’t varied yet,” Stone replied in an unintentional whisper. “Surface material seems totally consistent. The ash residue has solidified, and it’s coating every surface, like the inside of a chimney. I’m not seeing any other passages, and the temperature is rising as we go deeper.”

  “The temperature change is consistent with the geothermal gradient,” said Odhiambo. “This is essentially a hole in the ground. Like a cave, but made of exotic material and with totally unnatural, nongeological features.”

  A sense of wonder had settled into Odhiambo’s voice.

  “I never thought I would see it,” he mused. “A xenogeologist studies pictures, data collected across billions of kilometers of space. And here I am. Standing inside a piece of extraterrestrial architecture.”

  “Frightening, isn’t it?” asked Peng.

  “It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” said Odhiambo.

  “And what exactly makes you so certain this is alien?” asked Stone.

  “My assumption is based on the unique geological attributes of this environment. This substrate appears perfectly uniform. The interior void exhibits a six-sided configuration that perfectly mirrors the underlying structure of the microparticle. And I didn’t say ‘alien,’ Dr. Stone. I said ‘extraterrestrial.’ You will recall that the first evolution of this incredible material was found lingering in the upper limits of Earth’s atmosphere by the Scoop VII satellite.”

  “And it killed forty-six innocent people on first contact, followed by two soldiers, one pilot, one patrol officer, and five more in a nearby town,” added Stone, his voice grave. “Men, women, and children.”

  “Before evolving into a benign expression,” said Odhiambo.

  “I wouldn’t call the AS-2 plastiphage benign. Not if I were friends with the pilot who lost his life over Piedmont when every polymer in his jet was dechained and dissolved in under two minutes.”

  “Fair enough, Dr. Stone. You are right,” said Odhiambo. “It is easy for me to forget that your father was there, on the original Wildfire mission. This must all feel very personal to you.”

  Vedala was watching Stone closely.

  “I believe it is alien,” said Peng. “For my part.”

  “And why is that?” asked Vedala. “Intuition?”

  “It is a microparticle found on the edge of space. No amino acids, no waste products, and a unique cellular structure. More machine than biological. Designed to survive in a low-oxygen, ultraviolet-rich environment. Every indication is that it was designed for a purpose.”

  “That, or it’s an exotic terrestrial particle ejected into the atmosphere by a volcanic eruption or asteroid impact,” replied Vedala. “Far from having come from outer space, it could have evolved deep under the earth’s crust.”

  Peng said nothing more, staring at Vedala without expression. A clear wedge had appeared between the two, based on a simple miscommunication.

  Specifically, the closest Chinese parallel to the word intuition—on the mainland, zhijue—does not directly translate into the Western understanding of the term. The notion of zhijue does not exist within the Confucian classics or in the traditional development of Chinese history, either, having been spawned after its introduction by Western philosophers in the 1800s.

  The main difference between an Eastern and Western understanding of intuition, as laid out by Liang An in his work Etymology: A Clash of East and West, lies in its placement somewhere between instinct and intellect. In the West, the idea of intuition is ontologically identical to that of instinct. In the East, and from Peng Wu’s understanding, the notion of intuition is based on lixing, i.e., the intellect. To her mind, intuition was a leap of faith made from a bedrock of fact.

  The two scientists stared at each other without speaking. Their stalemate was broken only by an exclamation by Dr. Stone.

  “Oh my god,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Stone’s horrified face was outlined in light from his monitor. It disappeared as he flipped the glowing screen around to show the others. A flickering video feed was playing, gathered by a canary drone approximately two hundred yards ahead. The drone was hovering over an object sprawled on the ground.

  It was a body, that much was clear.

  The corpse was on its stomach, facedown. The limbs were curiously elongated. It didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, though some parts of the skin were mottled darker than others. The remaining flesh was pale in the strafing light of the drone. Most disturbing, the body appeared to have sunk partially into the floor.

  “It was crawling. Whatever it was, it looks like it was trying to crawl—” muttered Stone, before Vedala shushed him with a wave of her hand.

  “Make no assumptions,” she said. “Move the drone closer.”

  As the canary drew nearer to the corpse, the horrific image became clearer.

  “What is it?” asked Stone, afraid to state the obvious.

  “I don’t know,” said Odhiambo, “but it doesn’t look human to me.”

  Evolutions

  IN THE CUPOLA WINDOWS OF THE ISS, A RED LIGHT BEGAN to blink. Kline watched it, hesitating. A call was incoming from NORTHCOM at Peterson AFB.

  Kline’s interactions with General Stern had grown more aloof as the hours mounted postrendezvous. She was not sure that communicating with him would further her aims. Ultimately, however, she decided to take the call.

  [initiating satellite uplink—link established—connect]

  ISS-KLINE

  Kline here.

  PAFB-STERN

  Has there been any word from the team?

  ISS-KLINE

  Negative, Northcom.

  PAFB-STERN

  We have an indication they are alive. Were you aware?

  ISS-KLINE

  Negative.

  PAFB-STERN

  Are you monitoring the tower that’s grown out of the lake? It’s nearly a mile high. I’m desperate, Sophie. And pardon me, but so far your utility has been low. I expected more. Any ideas?

  ISS-KLINE

  Negative. Sir.

  PAFB-STERN

  [ten-second pause] Very well. Your involvement has come to an end, Dr. Kline. Thank you for your contribution. But our mission has failed.

  ISS-KLINE

  I disagree, General.

  PAFB-STERN

  Excuse me?

  ISS-KLINE

  My mission has only just begun. I wanted to let you know myself, in my own words.

  PAFB-STERN

  What are you—

  [end transmission]

  Cutting off the connection, Kline kept her eyes trained on the internal ISS camera feed. Her two fellow crew members continued their daily work, oblivious. As she watched them, Kline’s physiological monitoring registered changes in respiration and heart rate that signaled her growing excitement.

  This was unusual, as Kline rarely departed from a resting baseline. Through the use of deep breathing and mindfulness techniques, she normally kept her emotional state opaque to the physiological sensors and
the prying eyes of the ground-based crew in Houston.

  Today was different.

  Kline employed no calming routines. Instead, she simply reached to her wrist and snatched off the watch-size Bluetooth wireless monitor. Deactivating it, she let the device float away—its signal gone dead.*

  Dr. Sophie Kline was finished with pretense. She was done acting, lying, and hiding her emotions from constant ground-based observation. She had been concealing her true intentions for two years.

  And now, those intentions were about to be revealed.

  Heart thumping, Kline pulled out her custom robotic workstation interface. Slipping on the telepresence gloves and pulling her head-mounted display over her eyes, she flexed her fingers. A hundred yards away, the Robonaut R3A4 did the same.

  The robot began to move its arms.

  It typed on a keyboard, activating a suite of dedicated onboard computers located in the isolated laboratory module. The commands it was able to execute from this location had been given permanent emergency priority. In the event of a catastrophe, NASA had deemed it crucial that other ISS subsystems be accessible from the relative safety of the Wildfire lab.

  A hostile action from within had never even been considered.

  As she worked, Kline was blind to an ominous sight outside the cupola window just beyond her shoulder. A smudge had appeared on the nadir face of the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module, still disguised as a Cygnus unmanned cargo vehicle after five years in operation. It was glowing violet in the vacuum of space, unnoticed. It flashed, a brighter purple, and then it was bigger.

  Wearing her visor, Kline was seeing the world through a machine’s eyes. Only the lower half of her face was visible, lips moving as she spoke quietly to herself. After years of grinding work, she had now embarked on a unilateral course of action. It was a plan known only to her, but one that would soon change her own life and that of every human being on the planet.

  Sophie Kline’s intention was to set the human race free.

  Forensics

  DEEP BENEATH THE AMAZON JUNGLE, AN UNRECOGNIZABLE body lay slumped under the drifting LED lights of half a dozen canary drones. The inhuman figure seemed to be emerging out of the solid floor like a swimmer surfacing. In death it had been trapped, half consumed, facedown and perfectly still.