The Andromeda Evolution
Once every splinter had been accounted for, the next step was to determine exactly what had happened. It was a multibillion-dollar question, and the world couldn’t know it was being asked without risking a civilization-ending panic.
As the Indian-born British historian Romila Chandra states in her classic tome, Fallen Empires of Man, “The instinct of the human being upon contact with a foreign civilization is to flee. If that is not possible, it is invariably to attack. Only after surviving first contact is there an overwhelming urge to learn more. But do not mistake this response for altruistic curiosity, rather it is simply a need to understand the other in order to protect oneself from it … or, more likely, to attempt to destroy it.” It is an apt description of how humanity behaved in the aftermath of Andromeda—especially after Russia and China learned of and responded to the events in Piedmont, Arizona, through their own spycraft.
The Russians were first, managing to push the Salyut 1 space station into orbit by 1971—only four years after the Andromeda incident. The United States attempted to catch up two years after that, but the Skylab launch was compromised by the “benign” plastic-eating strain of Andromeda still lingering in the upper atmosphere. During Skylab’s initial ascent, exposure to the AS-2 plastiphage resulted in a partially disintegrated heat shield, spewing debris that severely damaged the station.[fn1]
Skylab lasted six years. The Mir space station lasted longer, at ten years. Both failed to achieve their secret goal of studying Andromeda in microgravity. As it turned out, the problem was too big for one nation to solve alone—even a superpower.
In 1987, President Reagan called for the creation of an International Space Station, a joint venture between the Soviet Union and the United States, with more partner countries to come. Eyebrows went up around the world, as the Russians and Americans made for strange bedfellows. Privately, both nations were motivated by a mutual fear of allowing the Andromeda particle to go unstudied.[fn2]
Even then, a permanent space station was only the first step.
It was not until 2013 that the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module arrived (disguised as a Cygnus automated cargo spacecraft), and docked to the nadir port of the Harmony node at the front of the station. Its activation coincided with the beginning of Dr. Sophie Kline’s scientific missions to the ISS.
The top-secret module was born in the depths of the original Project Wildfire facility beneath Nevada, constructed entirely by sterilized robotic arms. Those robots were teleoperated by on-site workers who were themselves in an ISO Class 1 clean room. The final laboratory enclosure was completely self-contained and launched aboard an Antares-5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 17, 2013.
Once docked, the laboratory module constituted the only biosafety level (BSL) 5 containment facility ever created, much less placed in orbit. The Wildfire microgravity laboratory was self-irradiated every four hours with high-intensity ultraviolet light, and it contained no breathable atmosphere. It was instead pressurized with a combination of noble gases—odorless, colorless, and with virtually zero chemical reactivity. The cylindrical space inside the laboratory module was phenomenally clean and sterile, precisely because it was unoccupied.
There were only two potential organisms on board, and they were what the module had been built to study: material samples of the extraterrestrial microparticles known as AS-1 and AS-2.
The interior of the module had never been touched by a human being, and never would be. Every aspect of the laboratory’s functioning was remote-controlled via radio contact from outside. And this was exactly why Dr. Sophie Kline had been the first astronaut with ALS deployed to the International Space Station.
The wasting effects of Kline’s disease had made her the perfect recipient of a brain-computer interface at a young age. Years of training with the interface had given her the ability to control most computers as naturally as breathing—a crucial ability while handling highly dangerous samples through a remote connection.
Though there had been other operators, only Sophie Kline could control the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module with her mind.
WITH GENERAL STERN’S orders to report to the laboratory module still ringing in her ears, Kline hesitated for one moment. Her left eye twitched almost imperceptibly as she activated the muscle groups necessary to communicate with her personal computer, which activated a monitor along the lower wall of the cupola.
A real-time camera feed of the Kibo science module appeared. There astronaut Jin Hamanaka, apparently also alarmed by the change in trajectory, was busily checking propellant levels on her laptop. On a feed of the Zvezda service module, the cosmonaut Yury Komarov was outside his sleep station, calmly stowing his gear and preparing for an exercise routine during the hour window before morning conference.
Kline watched both feeds carefully. As far as she could tell, the other astronauts were not panicking or behaving erratically.
Pushing herself backward, Kline floated away from the cupola and “up” toward the exit in the ceiling. As she floated away, she watched the sprawling rain forest hundreds of miles below. The vista was already rotating away, replaced by the Atlantic Ocean as the station continued its eastward orbit.
In another time, the young Sophie Kline would have been abandoned to a sanitarium, immobile and forgotten—assuming she survived her childhood. The sole reason she had transcended gravity was humankind’s ever-growing mastery over nature. Looking down on the planet from the perspective of a god, trapped in a body that refused to obey her orders, she was acutely aware of this fact.
But—as history has proven time and again—in the hands of human beings, increasing power is increasingly dangerous.
Heavenly Palace
THE COALITION OF COUNTRIES THAT FUNDED THE International Space Station (and hoped to share in its discoveries) had neglected to include one of the largest and most ancient civilizations in the world—a proud and capable nation with the strength to develop its own competing effort to study Andromeda.
Alone and forced to act unilaterally, the People’s Republic of China inevitably set out to do just that.
Suspicion, distrust, and competitiveness had fractured the international effort to understand the Andromeda Strain. Although the AS-1 microparticle had proven that it would kill any human with equal savagery, no matter their ethnicity, the vagaries of politics blunted what could have been a united response. And that enmity came to a head with the creation of a new space station.
The Tiangong-1, whose name meant “heavenly palace” in Chinese, was launched on September 29, 2011. It was an auspicious date for both travel and grand openings, according to the astrological predictions of the Chinese zodiac calendar, the Sheng Xiao. After a successful launch, the station was placed into orbit at a slightly inclined attitude of nineteen degrees—a trajectory that coincided perfectly with regular resupply launches from the Chinese Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan Province.
Although the launch had not been advertised, American spy agencies watched intently and continued to monitor the station until its premature demise.
The end occurred in 2013, only two years into the multibillion-yen effort, when China suddenly announced that the project was over. Authorities there officially hailed Tiangong-1 as an “unmitigated success for the China National Space Administration and the Chinese people.”
However, around-the-clock observation from a series of earth-based imaging assets revealed a narrative very different than that of the official reports. It seemed Chinese Mission Control had lost radio contact, including telemetry, with their station.
Without any means of control, the Tiangong-1 fell into a decaying orbit.
Thermal readings from multiple spy agencies determined that life support had been shut off, with the surface of the station as cold as the space around it. Abandoned, the station continued to orbit the earth for several years, engines offline and radios silent.
On April 10, 2018, the scant air particles percolating in the upper atmosphere finally managed to drag the station into destructive reentry. The metal cylinder was ripped to superheated shreds by atmospheric friction, reduced to a flaming confetti that rained down on the planet below—directly above the primordial jungles of the eastern Amazon.
Thus, the entire effort ended in a brief streak of light and heat.
The failure would likely have been deemed harmless were it not for a single, final bit of information. During the continuous monitoring of the space station—from launch, to resupply missions, to its last fiery reentry—operatives had noticed something the Chinese space agency never mentioned publicly.
The last crew of three taikonauts had never emerged from the Tiangong-1.
Code Name Andromeda
BARELY FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE A JUNGLE CANOPY that itself soared a hundred and fifty feet high in places, a Sikorsky H-92 Superhawk helicopter thundered over shivering trees. The gray metal chopper was streaked with jungle mist, nose jutting out like the beak of a predatory bird. In its wake, bands of monkeys hooted in the treetops and colorful birds took startled flight.
James Stone didn’t remember falling asleep.
Even with the thudding of the rotors in his ears and the vibration of the window glass on the rolled-up jacket he was using for a pillow, he’d had no trouble nodding off.
Later, when every detail of his life was declassified and dissected, splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazines, it became well documented that Stone had the ability to fall asleep anywhere, at almost any time—to “turn off,” to use the parlance of soldiers.
James had been able to do this since he was a little boy.
Part of it must have been out of sheer necessity. Young James spent his childhood accompanying his famous father—the Nobel Prize–winning polymath Dr. Jeremy Stone—on his scholarly travels around the world. Well dressed and soft-spoken, little James seemed nothing like his loud, impatient father. Together they were an odd couple, circumnavigating the globe every few months as Dr. Stone delivered lectures, attended scientific talks, and toured various international scientific projects.
James very rarely saw his mother, Allison, after his parents were divorced near his ninth birthday. And although the two were so obviously different from one another, Stone’s father was clearly dedicated to ensuring that the boy learn something new every day of their never-ending travels. Today, this type of roving education is called world schooling.
Yet according to private interviews that were not splashed across the tabloids, there was another reason that Stone had become very good at falling asleep—it was because he so frequently woke up in terror, his skin crawling with the cobweb remnants of a singular nightmare. This time, aboard the Sikorsky, would have been no different.
In recovered cabin security footage, Stone woke with a start and stared dazedly at the stripped-down interior of the former military helicopter. The sun was low on the horizon outside, flooding the interior with ruddy morning light. His jaw tightening, Stone blinked a few times before apparently forcing himself to relax.
By his own account, the dream was always the same, its familiar images having solidified over the years into a kind of half memory. Stone described it as a gruesome stream of blood, wine-dark, flowing over white desert sand. The spreading stream stopped, suddenly still, wrong somehow, as the surface of the blood seemed to congeal all at once, the gleaming slick shrinking in on itself and solidifying into tiny grains of ocher dust—fine particles of dried blood that swirled up and away on the oven-hot breath of desert wind.
Stone shook his head to clear it.
Putting the dream out of his mind, he focused on the brightening jungle outside. He must have felt a sense of raw anticipation. As a child raised by a daredevil scientist, he had finally, at the start of his fifth decade, found himself joining an adventure to rival his father’s.
Briefing documents lay spread out on the empty seats beside him, covered in dire warnings and classifications. Among them was a stiff, waxy photograph accompanied by a few pages of technical readouts.
It was truly a stunning image.
The ultra-high-resolution picture had been created by the army’s adaptive super-resolution image reconstruction algorithm, which combined multiple video frames, still images, and radar-generated topographical information to construct a three-dimensional image and paint it with light in spectacular detail.
Even so, it still looked like a hoax.
The structure reminded Stone of his trips to the ancient Mayan temples of Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula. How the surprisingly intact rock edifices peeked their heads out of misty jungles, like giants frozen midstride over a primal landscape that had grown up around them.
Similar, except that the appearance of this particular structure had triggered the scrambling of an international coalition of esteemed scientists to the most remote jungle on the planetary surface. It was apparently worth hiring a black-market chopper for a surely outrageous price, and sending a trio of polite but firm active-duty soldiers to retrieve Stone from a guest lecture before a college class, midsentence, confiscating his phone and firmly escorting him away.
And yet Stone had only glanced at the glossy image. The structure was obviously interesting, but it wasn’t what had piqued his curiosity. That would have been the other readout:
MASS SPECTROMETRY RESULTS
/// These data were collected by [redacted] High-Resolution Spectral Analysis suite and are intended for AFSPC USE ONLY. ///
*** UNAUTHORIZED USE PROHIBITED. CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET—DISSEMINATION IS SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PENALTIES INCLUDING SUMMARY EXECUTION WITHOUT TRIAL ***
Unknown reading /// Unknown reading. N2. Saturation. /// Composition analysis …
… Incident in PIEDMONT, ARIZONA. MATCH *** MATCH *** MATCH ***
The atmospheric readings were startling in that they very nearly replicated the exact composition of air rising off the sunbaked plains of Piedmont, Arizona, in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident.
And with that, a haunting name was invoked:
PROJECT WILDFIRE * PROJECT WILDFIRE * PROJECT WILDFIRE *
The words would have undoubtedly caused deep, conflicting feelings in Stone. Over fifty years before, his father had played a significant role in stopping the spread of the Andromeda Strain. While under preliminary consideration for inclusion on the Wildfire roster, James Stone had been given access to a slew of classified documents. He had used the opportunity to pore over every detail of the incident—and especially his father’s part in it.
Yet to try and discuss it with the old man would have been impossible—literally illegal.
In all the years of traipsing around the globe together, there is no indication the father and son ever conversed about what happened in Piedmont. With his balding crew cut and thick-framed glasses, Dr. Jeremy Stone seemed never to have left behind the 1950s tradition of stoicism. He took his top-secret status very seriously. Jeremy Stone did not speak of the classified portions of the events that occurred during that five-day period—not to his son, not to any of his ex-wives, not to anyone else in his life.
The father was distant, and yet in many ways the boy worshipped him.
As an adult, James had grown up to be quite distinct from his thin, balding father. Tall and athletic, the younger Stone had a head of thick dark hair (graying now) and a quiet, driven personality. He had reached the highest level of professional success as a roboticist and artificial intelligence expert. Where his father had operated within the hallowed traditions of academia, James had become an industry darling, a perpetually single workaholic who consulted across a variety of high-tech corporations—both start-ups and venerable institutions—wielding a razor-sharp intellect to collect massive paydays.
The elder Stone passed away still a bachelor, having married (twice to the wives of his colleagues) and divorced four times. James Stone apparently decided to forgo the entire process, never marrying or having children of his own. Despite their differences, James was his father’s son in so many ways.
According to Stone, after receiving contingent approval to join the modern-day Project Wildfire early in his career, not telling his father about it was one of the hardest things he had ever done in his life.
But it’s exactly what his father would have done in his place.
THOUGH RECORDS OF the Sikorsky H-92 pilot and copilot do not exist, word of mouth indicated that they were Brazilian narcotraficantes—subjectively a pair of criminals, but objectively the best in the world at navigating the largely unpoliced cross-basin routes favored by the Colombian cartels.
The pilot did not understand why he was flying an americano, much less during the daytime; he also did not know of the huge, unmarked cash payment made to his superiors; and he was not completely sure he would make it out of this job alive.
This last concern was actually quite valid.
At Peterson AFB, the Sikorsky was under constant surveillance. An F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter had been hastily launched from just off the Pacific coast, where it was stationed aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). The carrier strike group had been dispatched under the guise of a joint American and Peruvian emergency response exercise. If the Sikorsky helicopter were to show any sign of contamination, the high-altitude fighter was one trigger word away from launching a bevy of AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air missiles.
The helicopter pilot was unaware of this information, but certainly suspected something was wrong. Wisely, he chose not to deviate from the prescribed course in the slightest—despite what was about to unfold.
“Agora, nos descemos,” the pilot said to the American. “Brace. Brace yourself.”
In the cabin, James heard the static-filled voice of the pilot over his headphones.
“Why here?” he replied, scanning the unbroken jungle below. “We need to be closer.”
“Quarantena. Thirty miles.”
Quarantine zone. So the government had learned something since Piedmont. If the AS-2 plastiphage microparticle were airborne near the site, it could infect low-flying aircraft. In recovered cabin video, James can be seen hastily checking the rubber of the window gasket—running a finger along the soft plastic seal and examining it.
Still intact.
The second evolution of the Andromeda Strain, called AS-2, was known to dechain the polymers that made up synthetic rubber, especially the early blends synthesized before the microparticle had been studied. And although the information was classified, James Stone knew that Andromeda still permeated the nitrogen-rich mesosphere high above them.
Stone exhaled a deep breath.
If an AS-2 strain had infected the helicopter, he’d know it already. With vital engine parts disintegrating, they would have careened into the jungle and died in a crunch of metal and dirt—as had the unfortunate pilot of the F-40 Scavenger jet that had streaked over the Piedmont site after first contact. Or like the Andros V spacecraft, which had come crashing down in a fiery blaze on February 17, 1967, its tungsten-and-plastic-laminate heat shield turned to sterile dust.
Confident that his fiery demise wasn’t coming in the next few seconds, Stone turned to what lay beyond the window. Everything outside was Terra Indigena—mile after mile of government-protected land. He wondered whether the Brazilian government had even been informed of this mission.
He doubted it.
Stone caught sight of a plume of red smoke outside, rising from a clear-cut patch of jungle near a riverbank. A smallish, recently constructed maloca hut sprouted from the center of the clearing, surrounded by hacked vegetation and fallen trees.
It looked like a scar to Stone, a cigarette burn on the face of the pristine jungle.
To the pilot, however, the clearing looked like the only landing pad within five hundred miles. Flying past and gaining altitude, he wheeled the bird into a wide circle to surveil the area and alert the people below that he would be coming in for a landing.
In the audio logs, a burst of confused and frightened dialogue can be heard ricocheting between the pilot and copilot. Three seconds later, the pilot yanked the control stick and dropped the Sikorsky into a stomach-churning descent. The anomaly was barely discernible on the horizon. But for an instant, something else had been briefly visible in the treetops—still several miles away.
Stone clearly saw it, too.
“Wait!” he called over the radio. “What was that? In the trees?”
The chopper only sank faster, spiraling, rapidly losing altitude.
“Go. Now!” the pilot shouted at Stone, tapping his copilot.
The copilot climbed back into the cabin, reaching across Stone’s lap and unceremoniously yanking open the rolling side door. Shrinking back, Stone saw they were still a hundred feet up. Outside, a roaring mass of jungle canopy shuddered under the pounding rotors, and the cabin was filled with a wash of humid air.
Craning his neck, Stone was able to snatch a final, puzzling glance of the bizarre scene in the distance.
Then the Sikorsky sank below the tree line, jolting onto the ground, tires bouncing on the red mud of the clearing. As the helicopter settled, the pilot left the controls and joined his copilot in the cabin, rushing to detach Stone’s luggage where it was secured in webbed fabric. They ignored the American, shouting to one another in Portuguese, leaving the engines running and the rotors spinning.
Stone still could not quite understand what it was he had seen.
It appeared at first to be a wave of darkness washing over the tree canopy. A swarm of black shapes, thrashing like a school of salmon going upstream—a ripple of movement under the electric green foliage.
“Senhor!” shouted Stone, over the noise of the rotors. “What was that? Were they—”
Stone’s voice cut out as the pilots turned to him.
It was the naked fear on the faces of what he would later describe as “hard men” that took Stone’s breath away. And at that moment, some symmetry in the twisting shapes he had seen coalesced in his mind.
The pilot and copilot tossed out Stone’s black hard-case luggage. Stone hastily gathered his papers, snatched up his duffel bag, and got to his feet. He stood in the open doorway for a moment, a lean silhouette against the crimson sunlight outside.
Stone turned to the pilot, his voice hollow as he spoke. “Those were monkeys, weren’t they? Swinging through the upper branches in a panic. Hundreds of them. A thousand.”
The pilot said nothing, emotionless behind mirrored sunglasses. Without warning, his copilot took hold of Stone’s shoulders and roughly shoved him through the helicopter door. He tumbled out and fell to his knees on the muddy ground.
The Sikorsky had already lifted off before Stone could get to his feet.