The Andromeda Evolution

Hopper sat down at her own console at the back of the room, enjoying the soft murmuring of her analysts’ voices. Glancing up at the telemetry monitors lining the front wall, she saw nothing out of the ordinary—just the way she liked it.

It was said by her colleagues (in private) that Hopper, a calm, gray-eyed woman, had the patience of a land mine. In fact, she was perfectly satisfied with the slow pace of this job. She was the third acting commander of the project. Both of her predecessors had devoted the entirety of their careers to this post. As far as Hopper was concerned, it would be perfectly fine if Project Eternal Vigilance lived up to its name.

By the account of her longest-serving analysts, Hopper was fond of the rather pedantic saying “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

It was a sentiment that had begun to go stale among her staff.

This low morale was ironic, considering that at its inception, Project Eternal Vigilance had been considered the prime posting within all armed forces, and every roster spot vigorously competed for (by those with the security clearance to even know of it).

The project had been spawned in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident—a weapons research program gone horribly wrong, detailed in the publication popularly known as The Andromeda Strain.

In the late 1960s, the US Air Force deployed a series of high-altitude unmanned craft to search for weaponizable microparticles in the upper atmosphere. In February 1967, the Scoop VII platform proceeded to find exactly what the military men were looking for, except that the original Andromeda Strain was far more virulent than anyone could have guessed.

Before it could be retrieved by military personnel, the recovery capsule was compromised by overly curious civilians. The microparticle proceeded to infect and gruesomely wipe out the entire forty-eight-person population of the town of Piedmont, Arizona—save for an old man and a newborn baby. These surviving subjects were discovered and rescued by the acclaimed bacteriologist Dr. Jeremy Stone and the pathologist Dr. Charles Burton. The two survivors were isolated for study in an underground cleanroom laboratory, code-named Wildfire. Their fates were eventually classified to protect their privacy.

It was in Wildfire that a team of eminent scientists, hand selected for this situation, raced to study the exotic microparticle later dubbed AS-1; they found that it was one micron in size, transmitted by inhalation in the air, and caused death by near-instantaneous coagulation of the blood. And although its microscopic six-sided structure and lack of amino acids indicated it was nonbiological, AS-1 proved capable of self-replicating—and mutating.

Before the Wildfire team could finish their tests, the Andromeda Strain evolved into a novel plastiphage configuration called AS-2. Though harmless to human beings, AS-2 was able to depolymerize the plastic sealing gaskets that isolated the laboratory bulkheads. A nuclear fail-safe was triggered and heroically disarmed moments before detonation.

However, remnants of the AS-2 variety escaped, the particles outgassing into the atmosphere and dispersing globally. Although this new particle was not harmful to humans, it wreaked havoc on nascent international space programs that depended on advanced polymers to reach orbit.

Thus began Project Eternal Vigilance.

Hours after the Andromeda incident, the founding members of Project Wildfire lobbied the president of the United States for emergency resources. The goal was to begin worldwide monitoring for new outbreaks of the Andromeda Strain or its subsequent evolutions. Their proposal was given immediate and generous funding from the Department of Defense black budget, staffed with top analysts, and officially activated three days later.

But that was over fifty years before, and every scientist involved in the first Andromeda incident had since passed away.

Today, Colonel Hopper watched as the rows of computer monitors came on, bathing her analysts’ faces in bluish light. The colonel sighed at the view, ruminating on the huge expense necessary to secure every bit of satellite time, every analyst hour, and the immense amounts of data transfer and storage.

Colonel Hopper was well aware of her unit’s dwindling influence. At every morning shift, she noted the increasing mileage on her equipment, the attrition of her best analysts, and the encroaching needs of the other units at work in Fairchild AFB.

In particular, Air Mobility Command (AMC) had been pushing for more satellite time to ease their daily task of coordinating KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling craft in the thin air high above Tibet and the Middle East. The acting commander of AMC had even gone on record with the opinion that Eternal Vigilance was a pointless waste of resources.

And it seemed he was correct.

Eternal Vigilance had been on high alert for over fifty years—with Hopper at the helm for the last fifteen. And before today, it had never found a single thing.

IT IS A WELL-ESTABLISHED Achilles’ heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits. This effect is particularly evident when considering payoffs that will take longer than a generation to arrive—a phenomenon called intergenerational discounting.

The concept was formally introduced by the young French economist Florian Pavard during a poorly attended speech at the International Conference on Social Economics on October 23, 1982:

The average span of a human generation is twenty-five years. Any reward occurring beyond this generational horizon creates an imbalance that undermines long-term cooperation. In short, we as a species are motivated to betray our own descendants. In my view, the only possible solution is the institution of harsh and immediate punishments for those who would be unfaithful to the future.

It has been subsequently theorized that our species’ seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization.

Sadly, all the evidence of world history supports this theory.

And thus, despite well-known deadly high stakes, Project Eternal Vigilance suffered from endemic human shortsightedness. Over the years, the operational capacity of the program had been deferred, discounted, and diminished. And on this particular rainy morning, the project was on its last legs, barely functioning … but still viable.

At 16:24:32 UTC Colonel Hopper was seen on internal video, sitting at her desk with perfect posture. Her half-empty thermos of coffee rested atop a pile of equipment requisition forms that she must have known would be denied, and yet had forced herself to complete anyway.

A call came through.

Sliding on her headset, Hopper punched a button on her comm line, her monitors erupting into life.

“Vigilance One. Go ahead,” she said, speaking in the clipped tones of a lifelong data analyst.

The voice she heard had a distinct American accent, and she recognized it from her dwindling team of field operatives.

“This is Brasiliero. I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”

“Private channel is open, pending certificates.”

“Pushing through now.”

Tapping keys, Hopper granted the request.

All at once, the bank of four flat-panel monitors lining the front wall flared with data. Each monitor showed a discrete overhead view of the Amazon jungle: a basic unenhanced digital camera image; a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) map; an enhanced-color hyperspectral view of the canopy; and the minutely detailed gray-scale topography of synthetic aperture radar.

The drone footage was live, being generated in real time.

One by one, the eight analysts looked up at the front screens, pushing their chairs away from desks and murmuring to one another. Personalized workstations began to blink with ancillary data, information flowing to specialists according to their domain of control. Colonel Hopper stood.

In the dead center of every image stood something unexplainable.

It appeared to be a featureless block, curved slightly. It rose above the steaming expanse of jungle, laid directly across a river tributary. At its base, sluggish water flowed from underneath. Behind it, the blocked river had pooled into what looked like a giant mud puddle, flooding the surrounding jungle. The nearby trees and vegetation that hadn’t been swamped seemed frail and bent, dying.

“The anomaly is located on the descent trajectory of Heavenly Palace,” said Brasiliero, over the room speakers. “The Tiangong-1 space station was directly above—”

“Roger that, Brasiliero. That will be all for now,” replied Hopper, putting the connection on hold.

With a glance, Hopper checked the latitude and longitude. The anomaly was perfectly equatorial, with a line of zero degrees latitude to seven decimal points—a precision of approximately one yard. She added this observation to the incident notes. It was an odd detail, seemingly important, and yet catastrophically misleading.

Dale Sugarman, the senior signals intelligence analyst, stood up and turned to face Colonel Hopper, his headphones dangling around his neck. In five years, she had never seen the huge man demonstrate excitement about anything other than video games. Now, the senior airman’s shaky voice echoed sharply through the all-room speaker loop: “This data is impossible, ma’am. There are no roads, no airstrip, no way to build anything out there. Sensor error. I advise overhauling the drone. Send in—”

“‘Impossible’ is the wrong word, Airman,” said Hopper crisply, crossing her arms. A conviction crept into her voice as she continued, “What we are seeing is not impossible. It is simply an ultra-low-probability event.”

The room fell silent as the analysts considered her words.

There exists a certain class of event that can technically occur, yet is so incredibly unlikely that most laymen would consider it impossible. This false assumption is based on a rule of thumb called Borel’s fallacy: “Phenomena with extremely low probabilities effectively never happen in real life.”

Of course, the mathematician Émile Borel never said such a thing. Instead, he proposed a law of large numbers, demonstrating that given a universe of infinite size, every event with nonzero probability will eventually occur. Or put another way—with enough chances, anything that can happen will happen.

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.”

“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.

Alert

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.