The Andromeda Evolution

THE ANDROMEDA EVOLUTION

A NOVEL BY DANIEL H. WILSON

Michael Crichton

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

First published in the United States by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © CrichtonSun LLC 2019

CrichtonSun™ and the CrichtonSun™ logo are trademarks of CrichtonSun, LLC.

Text designed by Lucy Albanese

Three illustrations in Day 5/Ascent by Alexis Seabrook

Photograph details in Day 5/Ascent (ribbon out of plane window) © Shutterstock

Cover design and illustration by Will Staehle © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Michael Crichton and Daniel H. Wilson assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008172961

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008172985

Version: 2019-10-23

Dedication

For M.C.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Day 0: Contact

Event Classification

Fairchild AFB

Alert

Day 1: Terra Indigena

Emergency Debris Avoidance Maneuver

Heavenly Palace

Code Name Andromeda

Boots on the Ground

Noon Field Briefing

Manifest

Day 2: Wildfire

Dawn Discovery

Twenty-Mile Perimeter

A Higher Analysis

Incomplete Information

Second Camp

Day 3: Anomaly

Night Ambush

Alpha and Omega

In the Morning Light

Outcomes

Indios Bravos

First Contact

Plan B

The Anomaly

Fail-Safe

Day 4: Breach

Operation Scorched Earth

Dawn Strike

Entry

Primary Descent

Evolutions

Forensics

Fight or Flight

State of Emergency

The Tunnel

Best-Laid Plans

Inundation

Activation

Day 5: Ascent

A New Paradigm

Finger of God

Realignment

Z-Axis

Mission Preparation

Destination ISS

Docking Procedure

Stone’s Theory

Reunited

Goodbyes

Intercepted Transmission

Super-Terminal Velocity

Resolution

Out of Eden

Epilogue

Footnotes

References

Keep Reading …

About the Authors

Also by Michael Crichton

About the Publisher

ANDROMEDA EVOLUTION

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN THESE PAGES YOU WILL FIND THE METICULOUS RECONSTRUCTION of a five-day scientific crisis that culminated in the near extinction of our species.

It is important to recognize up front that the advanced technology that is the hallmark of our modern world was not itself the cause of this crisis—though it exacerbated it. The response to the Andromeda Evolution was unprecedented in its coordination and scientific sophistication. Yet it was this same scientific mastery that enabled tragic errors resulting in terrible destruction and loss of life.

Nevertheless, it is vital this story be told—now more than ever.

A greater number of human beings walk the earth today than at any other point in the history of our species. We are able to survive in our billions thanks only to the technological infrastructure we have built to sustain ourselves. And every last one of us could be gone tomorrow, confronted with the failure of that same infrastructure.

My hope is that this rigorous account of events will demonstrate both the capabilities and the limits of scientific progress—the good and the bad.

An accurate and detailed reconstruction was only possible thanks to the generous contributions of those who were involved in the disaster, directly or indirectly, as well as a small army of domain experts and fact-checkers. I wish to thank them all, though I must take responsibility for any errors or omissions that have crept into this manuscript.

For their chapter-by-chapter technical corrections, my sincere gratitude goes to Captain Jake B. Wilcox, US Air Force (Ret.); Liu Wang, PhD, China National Space Administration (CSNA); Deepayan Khan, PhD, Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute; David Baumann, Chicago Dynamics Incorporated; Ricardo Boas, Department for Isolated Indians, FUNAI; and Jane Hurst, PhD, NASA Johnson Space Center.

The bulk of this work depended on the efforts of Dr. Pamela Sanders, a US Army colonel, professor, and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the US Military Academy at West Point. With the help of her indefatigable students, Dr. Sanders was instrumental in securing, transcribing, and categorizing thousands of hours of video footage, audio recordings, and raw sensor data recovered from body-mounted cameras, the logs of the International Space Station, salvaged aerial drones, and satellite-based surveillance systems (in cooperation with the National Reconnaissance Office).

I especially wish to thank the surviving members of the second-generation Project Wildfire, who were able to sit with me after their debriefings to verify even the most minute details. And for those members who did not survive, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the friends, coworkers, and family members who set aside their grief to share the intimate stories necessary to convey their loved ones’ unique constellations of personality, expertise, and motivation. It is thanks to their gracious efforts if these pages are able to breathe life and humanity into what could otherwise be a dry and technical treatment of events.

By compiling a multitude of personal viewpoints along with hard facts, I have attempted to capture the fear and wonder that fueled the deadly events of these five days. In some cases, the reader must bear with practical reports based on little more than hard data, but when possible, this reportage has been bolstered with subjective opinions, thoughts, and emotions reported after the fact. By using both avenues of information, I have taken the liberty of reconstructing events to provide a more traditional narrative experience.

Lastly and most importantly, this account would never have been possible without the groundbreaking work of the late Michael Crichton, MD—a visionary who shattered a code of silence and introduced a stunned world to the precursor events to this crisis. The original account of the Andromeda Strain, published fifty years ago, opened the eyes of millions of readers to the great potential and dire limitations of scientific progress. Along with countless others, I am forever in awe of and deeply indebted to Crichton’s contributions.

It may seem disheartening that this new crisis unfolded along the same fault lines of human hubris, miscommunication, and plain bad luck as the first Andromeda incident. However, it is not my intent to vilify or blame any institution or individual. In the moment, each of us necessarily believes we are the hero of our own story—even those of us later judged to be villains.

I will leave such judgments to you, the reader.

The scientists, astronauts, and soldiers who lived through the events described in these chapters were human beings, with strengths and flaws. Some showed surprising heroism in the face of annihilation, while others failed at crucial moments. But none acted in vain—for at the very least, we all of us are still here, still alive to read and learn from this unlikely chronicle of human survival, a saga known now by its code name: the Andromeda Evolution.

D.H.W.

Portland, Oregon

January 2019

Event Classification

WHEN IT ALL BEGAN AGAIN, PAULO ARAÑA WOULD have been bored. Bored and sleepy. He was only a year from retirement from the National Indian Foundation of Brazil, known under its Portuguese acronym FUNAI. Stationed on the outskirts of government-protected land stretching across the Amazon basin, the sertanista was in his mid-fifties and had spent his career protecting the undeveloped interior of Brazil. He was sitting under a flickering, generator-run lightbulb, lulled to drowsiness by the rising morning heat and the familiar sounds of the untamed jungle outside the open windows of his monitoring station.

Paulo was at least thirty pounds overweight, sweating in his official olive FUNAI uniform, and seated before an old metal desk loaded with an eclectic array of electronic equipment. As was his habit, he was squinting down at his lap, his concentration focused intently on hand-rolling a tobacco cigarette with his blunt yet surprisingly agile fingers.

His movements were sure and quick, with no hesitation or trembling, despite the gray whiskers jutting from his cheeks and his steadily failing eyesight.

As he lit and puffed contentedly on his cigarro, Paulo did not notice the red warning light flashing on his computer monitor.

It was a small oversight, normally harmless, and yet on this morning it carried consequences that had already begun to snowball exponentially. The unseen light was hidden behind the curl of a yellow sticky note (directions to a local fishing hole). It had been blinking unheeded since late afternoon the day before.

The flashing pixels were signaling the beginning of a global emergency.

A THOUSAND FEET overhead, an Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) the size of a school bus was thrumming steadily over the vast Amazonian jungle. Dubbed the Abutre-rei—“King Vulture” in Portuguese—its wheels were caked in reddish jungle mud from a rough landing strip and its white hull streaked with the corpses of insects. Nevertheless, the drone was sleek and predatory—like an artifact from the distant future that had slipped backward in time to hover over this prehistoric land.

The Abutre-rei was on an endless mission, sweeping back and forth over a green sea of jungle canopy that stretched to all horizons. The unblinking black eye of its gyro-stabilized, self-cleaning camera lens was trained on the ground below, and a Seeker ultra-wideband synthetic-aperture radar unit invisibly illuminated the complex terrain with timed pulses of radio waves that could penetrate rain, dust, and mist. Back and forth, back and forth. The drone was specialized for environmental monitoring and photogrammetry—relentlessly constructing and reconstructing an ultra-high-resolution map of the Amazon basin.

Inside his monitoring station, Paulo only half watched as the constantly updating image knitted itself together on his monitor. An occasional haze of stale bluish smoke rose from the spit-soaked cigarro parked in its usual spot at the corner of his mouth.

Everything changed at precisely 14:08:24 UTC.

At that moment, a new vertical strip of mapped terrain was added to the composite image. The unseen warning light was displaced fifty pixels to the left, just peeking out from under the sticky note.

Stunned, Paulo Araña stared at the pulsing red spot.

In recovered webcam footage, he could be seen blinking frantically, trying to clear his eyes. Then he snatched away the sticky note and crumpled it in his fingers. The dot was located beside a small thumbnail image of something the Abutre-rei had found in the jungle. Something Paulo could not even begin to explain.

Paulo Araña’s job at FUNAI was to monitor and protect an exclusion zone established around the easternmost region of the Upper Amazon—over thirty-two thousand square miles of unbroken jungle. It was a priceless treasure, site of both the largest concentration of biodiversity on earth and a terra indigena that was home to approximately forty uncontacted Amazonian tribes—pockets of indigenous human civilization with little or no exposure to the technology and disease of the outside world.

With such natural riches, the land was under constant attack. Like an army of termites, destitute locals were motivated to sneak into protected territory to fish virgin rivers or poach valuable endangered species; loggers were tempted to bring down the huge kurana, cedar trees that could fetch thousands of dollars on the black market; and of course, the hordes of narcotraficantes stopping over on their way from southern Brazil to Central America were a constant and brutal menace.

Preserving the wilderness required unwavering attention.

With a nicotine-stained finger, Paulo pecked a key to activate Marvin, a computer program housed in a beige plastic box wedged under his desk. Acquired years ago from a joint research effort with an American graduate program, the battered box was unremarkable save for a faded printout of an old Simpsons cartoon character taped to the outside.

On the inside, however, Marvin housed a sophisticated neural network—an expert system that had been trained on thousands of square miles of real jungle imagery, and over a hundred million more simulated.

Marvin could reliably identify a quarter-mile airstrip hacked out of the remote jungle by drug couriers; or the logging roads that threaded like slug trails into the deep woods, with larger trees intentionally left unmolested as cover; or even the occasional maloca huts built by the uncontacted tribes—rare and intimate glimpses of another world.

Most importantly, the program could scan ten square miles of super-high-resolution terrain in seconds—a feat impossible for even the most dedicated human being.

Paulo knew that Marvin was muito inteligente, but it had outright rejected this new data as not classifiable. This was something the algorithm had never seen, not in all its petabytes of training data.

In fact, it was something nobody had ever seen.

The output simply read: CLASSIFICATION RESULTS: UNKNOWN.

Marvin hadn’t even offered a probability distribution.

Paulo didn’t like it. He made a kind of surprised grunt, the cigarette trembling on his lower lip. Tapping keys rapidly, he enlarged the thumbnail image and examined it from every available angle, trying to dismiss it as a glitch. But it was no use—the strange sight defied explanation.

Something black was rising from the deepest jungle. Something very big.

Paulo waved smoke away with one hand, his gut pressing against the cool metal desk. He squinted at the dim screen, pushing his face closer. His balding head was coated in a cold sweat, gleaming under the stark light of the bulb overhead.

“No,” Paulo was recorded as saying to himself. “Isto é impossível.”

Thumbing a switch on a battered 3-D printer, Paulo waited impatiently as the raw image data was transferred to the boxy machine. The shack soon filled with the warm wax smell of melting plastic as an array of pulsing lasers set to work. Inch by inch, a hardened layer of plastic rose from the flat bed of the printer. As the seconds ticked by, the formless sludge resolved into a three-dimensional topographic map.

The pale white plastic was rising up in the detailed shape of the jungle canopy, looking for all the world like a bed of cauliflower.

Rolling and lighting yet another cigarette by instinct, Paulo tried not to watch as a new world slowly emerged from the unformed ooze. Each layer hardened in seconds, quickly firming into a scale model of the jungle. Wheezing slightly, Paulo cracked his knuckles one by one, staring blankly and smoking in silence.

In the rare instance that Marvin returned less than an 80 percent classification probability, it was up to Paulo to make the final determination. He did so by employing a carefully honed method that was strictly unavailable to the machine: his sense of touch.

Touch is the most ancient sensory faculty of any living organism. The human body is almost entirely covered with tactile sensors. The neural circuits related to the somatosensory system overlap with multiple other areas of sensing, in ways both unknown and unstudied. Of particular sensitivity are the countless mechanoreceptors in our lips, tongue, feet, and, most especially, our fingertips.

This was Paulo’s talent—one area where man rose above machine.

Eyes half closed, he began with static contact, lightly placing all eight of his finger pads on the model surface. Gently, Paulo added steady pressure to establish a touch baseline. And finally he scanned his fingers laterally over the meticulously rendered folds of jungle canopy.

Properly honed, the discriminatory power of skin receptors can exceed visual acuity. Every inch of the model’s texture corresponded to roughly one hundred yards of real-world terrain, resulting in contours only detectable through a cutaneous spatial resolution far superior to any computer’s image analysis, no matter how clever the machine.

Paulo could run his fingertips over the roof of the jungle and feel whether an unclassified data sample was the ragged, chain-sawed destruction of an airstrip or the smooth banks of an innocent new river tributary.

Eyes closed, limp cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Paulo slouched, his face to the ceiling. His outstretched hands traced the surface of the jungle as if he were a blind god touching the face of the planet.

When his questing fingers found the hard, unnatural lines of the … thing, Paulo Araña swallowed a low moan in the back of his throat. Whatever it was, it really did exist. But there were no roads nearby. No sign of construction. It could not be possible—out there alone and colossal among the primordial trees—and yet it was as real as touching the stubble on his own face.

The thing in the jungle rose at least a hundred feet above a skirt of raw wilderness, long and slightly curved, like a barricade. It spoiled the sanctity of a rain forest otherwise unbroken for thousands of square miles. And it seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

Around the perimeter of the structure, Paulo could feel a crumbling sensation. It was the texture of death—thousands of virgin trees collapsed and sick. This thing was a kind of pestilence, polluting everything nearby.

For a long moment, Paulo sat and contemplated raising an alert on the antiquated FUNAI-issued shortwave radio sitting on his desk. His eyes lingered on its silver dials as the generator puttered outside, providing the trickle of electricity necessary to connect this isolated shack to the rest of the world.

Pushing away from the desk, Paulo felt blindly under the drawers until his fingers brushed against a business card taped beneath. It contained the phone number of a young American who had recently contacted Paulo.

Claiming to be a businessman, the man had explained that a Chinese aircraft had recently been lost over this territory. His company was willing to pay a hefty price for information about it. Paulo had assumed (and continued to assume) that the American was looking for pieces of airplane wreckage, although he hadn’t said that. Not exactly. Instead, the man had said specifically to report “anything strange.”

And this was definitely that.

Using his palms to wipe away the sheen of sweat that soaked his face like tears, Paulo stared at the business card and punched a number on his desk phone.

A man with an American accent answered on the first ring.

“I’m glad you called, Mr. Araña,” said the voice. “I was right to trust you.”

“You already know?” Paulo asked, glancing at the computer screen.

“Marvin rang me just now, when you registered the anomalous classification,” said the voice. “He’s smarter than he looks.”

The Americans and their trickery. It never ceased to amaze Paulo. A people who seemed so trusting and forthright—all smiles … and yet.

“What now?” asked Paulo.

“You can relax, Mr. Araña. We’ve got people taking care of it. You’ll be well compensated for your assistance. But I am curious,” asked the voice. “What do you think it is?”

“I know it is not an error, senhor. It’s really out there. I have touched it.”

“Well, then?”

Paulo thought for a moment before answering. “It is a plague. Killing everything it touches. But I can never know what it is.”

“And why is that?”

“Because that thing out there … it was not built by any human hands.”

Fairchild AFB

NEARLY FIVE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, NEAR TACOMA, Washington, Colonel Stacy Hopper was arriving to a quiet morning shift at Fairchild Air Force Base. A skeleton crew of intelligence analysts who had worked overnight were just clocking out, leaving behind dimmed monitors on neat desks and a meager work log indicating that, as usual, nothing much had happened.

Crisply uniformed in her air force blues, complete with a service cap, tie tab fastened neatly around her neck, and sensible black hosiery, Hopper eyed the windowless control room. A thermos of coffee rested in the crook of her arm. Her morning crew of eight uniformed intelligence analysts were settling into their consoles, saying their good mornings, and slipping on headsets. Many of them had damp shoulders, having just arrived to work on another rainy morning in the Pacific Northwest.