The Andromeda Evolution

The call had come from Eternal Vigilance.

Ensconced in his private office at Peterson Air Force Base, Stern had at first reacted to the emergency notification from Colonel Hopper with mild annoyance. Although false positives would normally be eliminated before reaching him, his assumption was that one had slipped through.

Dismissing an incongruous screensaver of kittens shooting rainbows from their mouths (a gift from his youngest daughter), the general accepted Hopper’s information push. As his screen flooded with images of the anomaly, he leaned back in his chair with fingers knotted over his stomach and closed his eyes in frustration.

“Colonel Hopper. What is this?” he asked.

“I have a theory.”

“You have a theory. I’m late for my lunch. Since the promotion, they’ve got my days regimented into ten-minute increments. There are only so many of these increments in one day. You are occupying one now. I would rather it be occupied by a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.”

“Yes, sir. Did you see the trajectory?”

“I see a static object in the jungle, Colonel. There is no trajectory.”

“On April tenth of this year, the Tiangong-1 Chinese space station fell into destructive reentry and disintegrated. That anomaly is perfectly equatorial, and directly in the debris trajectory of the fallen station. You may recall the incident was code-named Heavenly Palace.”

General Stern sat up abruptly.

“We can’t confirm what the Chinese were experimenting with on that space station,” Hopper added.

“But we have a pretty good guess, don’t we?” responded Stern, the data on his screen.

This problem had just moved into a sphere of his thinking that outranked meals. It was an area that concerned not only national defense but the defense of the species.

The general’s mouth moved as if to speak, and then it closed.

“Good work, Colonel. We’ll take on your feeds and any information you’ve collected. I’m … why, I can’t believe I’m saying this …

“I am now issuing a Wildfire Alert.”

IT IS A little-known fact that human logistics experts have not independently planned or executed a major military endeavor for the United States of America since early in the Vietnam War. Every operation, from single-element transports to coordination of an entire operating theater, is at least partially computer generated under the umbrella of a sprawling and complex collection of algorithms known as automated logistics and decision analysis (ALDA).

In this aspect, the Andromeda response was no different than any other complex military response—it was machine generated.

Given General Stern’s initial data, ALDA activated the Percheron supercomputing cluster located in the chilled depths of the Air Force Research Laboratories beneath Wright-Patterson AFB in western Ohio. Kicking or delaying thousands of other lower-priority computing threads, ALDA connected to a massive, constantly refreshed data set of personnel and resources, coming back with a full mission loadout within fifteen minutes.

Yet even with its unprecedented level of processing power and data, ALDA had always been wisely deployed with an 80/20 rule—which holds that an algorithm should be depended upon to reach only 80 percent of the solution, with human common sense and intuition applied to the final 20 percent.

In this case, General Stern saw no technical flaws with the default loadout, which read as follows (still in partial machine code):

PROJECT WILDFIRE V2—CREW DOSSIER

NIDHI VEDALA, MD-PHD (AGE: 42)

Wildfire Clearance (FULL)

Designated: Command, 001 ***

Location: Massachusetts, Amherst >>> Travel Duration: ~12H ***

Specialization: Nanotechnology; materials science; Andromeda Strain: AS-1, AS-2 ***

Misc: Leadership quality; domain expert ***

HAROLD ODHIAMBO, PHD (AGE: 68) ***

Wildfire Clearance (ACADEMIC) ***

Designated: Lead Field Scientist, 002 ***

Location: Nairobi, Kenya >>> Travel Duration: ~15H ***

Specialization: Xenogeology; geology; anthropology; biology; physical sciences; …

Misc: Broad knowledge base ***

PENG WU, PLA Air Force, Major (AGE: 37) ***

Wildfire Clearance (PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC JOINT ALLIANCE) ***

Designated: Field Scientist, 003 ***

Location: Shanghai, China >>> Travel Duration: ~18H ***

Specialization: Taikonaut; soldier; medical doctor: pathologist ***

Misc: Combat training; survival training; possible domain knowledge [REDACTED] ***

ZACHARY GORDON, US Army, Sergeant First Class (AGE: 28)

Wildfire Clearance (PRELIMINARY) ***

Designated: Field Medic, 004 ***

Location: Fort Benning, Georgia *** Travel Duration: ~14H ***

Specialization: Ranger elite light infantry; battalion senior medic ***

Misc: Trauma surgeon ***

SOPHIE KLINE, PHD (AGE: 32)

Wildfire Clearance (NASA) ***

Designated: Remote Scientist, 005 ***

Location: International Space Station *** Travel Duration: N/A ***

Specialization: Nanorobotics, nanobiology, microgravity research ***

Misc: AS-1, AS-2 EXPERT ***

*** END DOSSIER ***

Stern paused at the inclusion of Major Peng Wu, a Chinese national who normally would have been excluded as a security concern. Then he shook his head, cracking a wry smile. The ALDA algorithm was relentlessly logical yet had often proven itself capable of nonintuitive decision-making. Given the situation with Heavenly Palace, it was a stroke of genius to bring in a Chinese military candidate who had been waiting, preapproved, in the Wildfire candidate pool.

Peng Wu was not just any taikonaut—she had actually participated in the first manned voyage to the Tiangong-1 space station. Stern knew she wouldn’t divulge any Chinese military secrets—they’d already tried discerning that—but her knowledge of what had happened up there could still save lives.

At this point, General Stern’s only duty was to give a verbal confirmation. However, a final exchange took place in the seconds before the go order was passed on—both upward to the president of the United States and down to the enlisted men and women immediately dispatched to execute first steps.

The following is a partial transcript of the last-minute exchange between General Stern and one of his most trusted officers:

< … >

0–10 GEN

Strike the last field candidate. I have a replacement.

S-OP-001

Zack Gordon? Are you sure, General?

0–10 GEN

Send Stone.

S-OP-001

I’m sorry, sir?

0–10 GEN

James Stone. Out of Palo Alto. You’ll find him on the standby list.

S-OP-001

[short pause] Sir, do you mean the son of Dr. Jeremy Stone? From the first Andromeda incident? This guy hasn’t got the clearance. His prep work is also out of date. I believe he was always a tangential candidate, too special-purpose.

0–10 GEN

I know. Send him anyway.

S-OP-001

There will be a delay while we wait for his security clearance.

0–10 GEN

Understood. Scramble my personal C-40 transport and go get him. That’ll help mitigate the delay.

S-OP-001

[long pause] You were close friends with Dr. Jeremy Stone, weren’t you?

0–10 GEN

Your point?

S-OP-001

I’m just afraid … you should consider the optics on this.

0–10 GEN

Listen, son. It’s not your career on the line. I’m invoking directive 7–12, citing top-secret situational knowledge that must remain opaque. My voice is my clearance, and I am General Rand L. Stern.

S-OP-001

Acknowledged, sir. Dossier approved and … the mission is live.

[typing sounds]

S-OP-001

Enlisted liaisons are being dispatched now to retrieve our field team. You are advised to report to local command and control to assume overwatch duties. Good luck, sir.

0–10 GEN

Roger that. And thank you.

S-OP-001

Sir?

[brief pause]

S-OP-001

Sir. If you don’t mind my asking. Off the record …

0–10 GEN

Nothing is off the record. You know that.

S-OP-001

Well then, on the record, but between us.

0–10 GEN

All right. Shoot.

S-OP-001

Why James Stone?

[long pause]

0–10 GEN

It’s just a hunch. Nothing more.

[end transmission]

Conservative estimates from the DC-based Nova America think tank conclude that Stern’s hunch likely saved three to four billion lives.

Emergency Debris Avoidance Maneuver

TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT MILES ABOVE EARTH, Dr. Sophie Kline floated quietly in a nimbus of her own long blond hair. It was just after 6:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time—the official time zone of the International Space Station, as a compromise to accommodate Mission Control in both Houston and Moscow—but her blue-gray eyes were wide open and alert. This early, both of her fellow astronauts were still in sleep cycle, and the observation cupola was shuttered, empty, and dark—the only sound a faint whirring from the Tranquility module ventilation systems.

It was Kline’s favorite time of day.

She punched a glowing button, and the hull began to whine as the exterior cupola shutters rose. The gentle glow of Earth’s surface lit the interior of the module, and Kline enjoyed the usual thrill in her stomach. She loved the feeling of being alone and suspended, looking down on the planet from on high. It gave her a sense of utter superiority, as if everything below were a part of her own creation.

This small daily ritual (confessed in a personal flight journal salvaged after the incident) might seem arrogant, but it was simply a dream of freedom.

As it was, Kline was floating in the windowed cupola with her paralyzed legs bound tightly together with Velcro straps to keep them out of the way. It was only in these quiet moments of weightlessness that she could almost forget the searing cramps and spasms that writhed through her devastated muscles.

Sophie Kline had not been able to walk since she was six years old, so she had chosen to fly. She was tall, despite her disability, and as she focused on the cupola window, her striking eyebrows and gaunt cheeks lent her a predatory appearance, softened only by a smattering of freckles across her nose and forehead.

Her path to the stars was so unlikely as to almost satisfy Borel’s fallacy. When Kline fell and broke her right arm at the age of four, her parents assumed she was simply clumsy or unlucky. Only one was true. At the hospital, an attentive pediatrician noticed that the little girl had a concerning tremor.

The incredibly unlikely juvenile amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (JALS) diagnosis came at the age of five, with the degenerative disease attacking her relatively newfound ability to walk. Sophie began her life in a wheelchair, though she had no intention of ending it there. With an almost inhuman resolve, particularly for a child, she had set her ingenious mind and iron will to escaping the bounds of gravity.

She had succeeded.

Every reputable doctor had predicted she would be dead by the age of twelve. Instead, she had persevered, taking advantage of each new medical advance, and eventually become a world-renowned scientist and an American astronaut.

Kline found that the chronic pain in her muscles nearly disappeared in microgravity, and her wasted body wasn’t a disadvantage the way it was on earth. In constant free fall, she was as physically capable as any astronaut. More capable, in fact, since she did not have to worry about the muscle-wasting effects of weightlessness.

Thus, using only her arms, Kline turned her body to face the circular porthole in the center of the viewing cupola. Six trapezoidal panes of glass splayed radially out from it—the largest window ever put to use in outer space. Beyond, the face of the planet slid past, surprisingly close. Today, she saw an endless jungle vista—a dense landscape of treetops twined with gleaming rivers that looked to Sophie like the wriggling trace of neurons.

It was a view that absolutely should not have been there, and the sight of it indicated that a serious emergency had occurred during sleep cycle.

Internal ISS video footage showed Sophie Kline muttering in disbelief, frantically scanning the computer monitors ringing the neck of the cupola. Physiological monitoring logs reported her heart rate elevating as she took hold of two slender blue handrails and pulled her face to within inches of the central porthole. The terrain scrolling past below would have been utterly unfamiliar to the seasoned astronaut.

Like the other two crew members on board the ISS, Kline’s body was instrumented with wireless physiological sensors. Unlike her crewmates’, however, Kline’s monitoring extended further—at one-second intervals, her mind was being read. As a teenager, Kline had been implanted with a Kinetics-V brain-computer interface (BCI) at her own insistence, so she could continue her college courses via computer as the disease progressed through her nervous system.

The BCI device was a golden mesh of thousands of wires, soaked in a biocompatible coating to prevent foreign body rejection, and sunk into the jelly-like surface of Kline’s motor cortex. Upgradable via radio, the current software iteration employed a deep-learning algorithm to map the electrical activity of neurons in Sophie’s brain to actions in the real world. The unique interface linked Kline mentally to the ISS computer systems—an almost telepathic connection.

Kline realized that the ISS had undergone a severe trajectory change. Such an event could only signal imminent disaster, and it should have been a cause for panic. Indeed, her outward reaction to the unexpected terrain had been consistent with surprise and shock. However, routine monitoring of her brain implant’s data stream showed that Kline’s predominant state of mind was an alpha brain wave varying between 7 and 13 Hz—a state of nonarousal, relaxed alertness in the face of mortal danger.

It was a small discrepancy that would go unnoticed until much later.

Kline opened a comm channel to Houston flight control and requested information from CAPCOM.

The initial response was static.

A lot had happened during the astronauts’ sleep period, beginning at precisely 23:35:10 UTC when, under the auspices of General Rand L. Stern, the USSTRATCOM Command Center issued an emergency notification to ISS Mission Control in Houston.

USSTRATCOM advised of a likely close approach of the ISS to multiple red threshold objects. Such notifications were fairly common, as the command center is tasked with monitoring any object in low orbit with a diameter larger than one and a half inches.

Officially, the debris source was attributed to a failed NSA satellite deployment, but console operators at Houston were backchannel notified that the orbital debris was in actuality the aftermath of a classified antisatellite weapons (ASAT) attack performed against China by Russia.

In public, these space warfare operations were universally condemned for scattering dangerous space junk in low Earth orbit. Yet it was an open secret that since the 1960s every spacefaring nation had been enthusiastically experimenting with ASAT platforms—from simple kinetic kill warheads to more sophisticated reusable approaches deploying shaped-charge explosives.

The attitude determination and control (ADCO) officer, at Mission Control, Vandi Chawla ran a simulation on the USSTRATCOM-supplied data and confirmed the high likelihood of a conjunction in the orbital pathway. Because they were red threshold objects, not yellow, there was no debate about the primary response. She immediately authorized an emergency debris avoidance maneuver (EDAM), even though the orbital modification would result in several missed launch opportunities over the next months, none of them critical resupplies.

While the astronauts slept, commands for a prolonged thirty-nine-minute avoidance maneuver were issued from the trajectory operations manager (TOPO) console. The ISS’s four 220-pound control moment gyroscopes shifted rhythm immediately. Made of stainless steel, the circular flywheels generated the torque that leaned the ISS forward at a constant four degrees—keeping the station’s floor pointed at Earth’s surface and maintaining an Earth-centered, Earth-fixed (ECEF) diving orbit. The electrically powered gyros began to modify the station attitude in preparation for the maneuver.

Once situated, the next step would normally have called for an extended thruster burn from the robotic Progress cargo module attached to the Pirs docking compartment. However, due to the substantial translation needed, TOPO decided to authorize use of an experimental solar electric propulsion (SEP) device.

Electrical power gathered by onboard solar arrays was routed to a cluster of highly efficient electrostatic Hall thrusters, conserving precious supplies of traditional chemical propellant. On activation, the thrusters pulsed in perfect rhythm, ejecting a flickering plume of plasma exhaust. The resulting force pushed the ISS upward directly through its center of gravity, while also translating the bulky structure to a southward trajectory.

A typical reboost maneuver would change only the altitude of the ISS, but in this case the azimuth was also modified from fifty-four degrees to zero, resulting in a highly unusual equatorial orbit. The maneuver was completed within the allotted time, and a summary press release was issued, citing a routine debris avoidance maneuver and praising the success of the SEP device.

General Stern had managed to coordinate the entire effort without ever informing NASA, RNCA, or JAXA of the true underlying emergency.

And yet Sophie Kline knew right away the trajectory change had something to do with Andromeda. This was not surprising, since Kline was one of the very few people intimately aware of the true purpose of the International Space Station.

The full, unclassified transcript of her initial exchange is below:

ISS-KLINE

Houston this is Station, come in. Requesting status update. What … [unintelligible] Why am I seeing Brazil moving east west?

HOU-CAPCOM

Just, uh, had an EDAM, Station. Orbital debris. Good news, though. The SEP thrusters worked perfectly.

ISS-KLINE

That is good news. But, this is so far … listen, I’m initiating a special query request. Have you been contacted by Peterson Air Force Base?

[static—four seconds]

HOU-CAPCOM

I’m sorry, Station, we’ve got no record—

[transmission lost]

[static—eleven seconds]

PAFB-STERN

Kline. This is Stern. We are on a private channel. I’ve got an update for your to-do list.

ISS-KLINE

Go ahead.

PAFB-STERN

Your scientific mission is suspended as of now. Until further notice, knowledge of your reassignment is to be restricted from all space agencies, including NASA. Do you understand?

[short pause]

ISS-KLINE

Yes sir, General Stern.

PAFB-STERN

You’ve been placed in an equatorial orbit that passes over the debris field of the fallen Tiangong-1 space station. We … It, it’s been hypothesized the station may have triggered a ground contamination upon reentry.

ISS-KLINE

In the jungle?

PAFB-STERN

Something is down there. Some kind of anomaly. It’s already killed people, and it’s spreading.

ISS-KLINE

I see.

PAFB-STERN

Project Wildfire has been reactivated, Dr. Kline. Your role is orbital lab support. The other ISS crew members will monitor for any remnants of the Tiangong-1 that are still atmospheric, under the guise of an emergency scientific mission.

ISS-KLINE

Understood.

PAFB-STERN

You will also monitor our field team from above. Eyes and ears. Got it?

ISS-KLINE

A field team? You’re not sending people into that jungle? General, please, at least wait until I can—

PAFB-STERN

No time, Doctor. Report to the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module. It’s already begun.

THE EXISTENCE OF the executive order can seem contradictory to democratic government. In times of emergency or in peace, the president of the United States may simply dictate national policy and have it executed in an instant—without review.

This act has been previously described as: “Stroke of the pen, law of the land.”

The first executive order was used by George Washington on June 8, 1789, to instruct the heads of all federal departments to create a State of the Union for the newborn country. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued one that became known as the Emancipation Proclamation—ultimately freeing three million slaves. And nearly a century later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a 550-word executive order that called for the United States government to incarcerate over a hundred and twenty thousand of its own citizens and residents of Japanese descent in concentration camps constructed across the Western United States.

It is a great and terrible power to wield, and one that can lead to historic repercussions—if it is ever made public, that is.

The classified executive order NSAM 362-S (known as a “National Security Action Memorandum” at the time) was issued three weeks after the first Andromeda incident and the subsequent back-to-back losses of the American Andros V manned spacecraft and the Russian Zond 19 mission. Within government circles, the order was widely regarded as symbolic. Off the record, many politicians considered the task to be on par with the Pharaohs’ orders to erect the great pyramids of Giza.

A portion of the order read:

TOP SECRET/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA ATTACHMENT NATIONAL SECURITY ACTION MEMORANDUM NO. 362-S

April 10, 1967

THE PRESIDENT Ordering the Creation of a Microgravity Laboratory Module to be Placed in a Space Station in Permanent Orbit.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby determine that it is vital for national security and the safety of our species itself to study the extra-terrestrial microparticle known as the Andromeda Strain in its natural microgravity environment, i.e., a state-of-the-art laboratory placed in low Earth orbit.

The estimated cost of the endeavor in 1967 was $50 billion, twice the cost of the Apollo program and (adjusting for inflation) approximately the same as the entire national military budget of 2018. In the upper echelons of government executives who were authorized to read the order, the president’s demand was met with derision and disbelief.

But the practical need to study the particle remained.

By the fall of 1967, the tiny town of Piedmont, Arizona, had been sterilized from top to bottom and the forty-eight bodies (including two US Army personnel) cremated. Every structure and vehicle was deconstructed and placed in hangar-like storage facilities built in the desert by the Army Corp of Engineers for this purpose. The task was accomplished carefully and with no casualties, thanks to the findings of the Wildfire team. The effect was so sudden, and the town so small, that within two decades the very existence of Piedmont was erroneously thought by many to have been fictional.