The team was too fatigued to explore further.
This expedition had gone utterly wrong. Death was now the most likely outcome. The only question was how quickly the end would come. Leaning his back against Vedala’s, Stone kept one arm wrapped around the boy’s bony shoulders. Despite their worries, they all three succumbed to a deep and dreamless sleep.
It was daylight that woke them.
“James,” whispered Vedala. “Look.”
Blinking his eyes open, Stone realized he could now see the room around him. A shaft of blazing morning light was falling from a hexagonal opening high in the ceiling. The light was faint by any normal standards, but having been in the dark for so long, Stone found it nearly unbearable to look at. Tupa had crawled off his lap and was yawning and staring at the room in surprise.
“A hole in the ceiling? How?” asked Stone. “We’re under a lake!”
“I have no idea,” said Vedala. “Look at this place, it’s so strange.”
Shading his eyes, Stone lowered his gaze. Like the rest of the anomaly, every surface he saw was made of the dark gray-green AS-3 substance. The room was six-sided, with a hexagonal pillar rising from the dead center, right through the open shaft in the ceiling. Some kind of platform, made of human materials like steel and glass, had been built around the central pillar.
“It’s like a cathedral,” mused Stone, standing and stretching. His low voice echoed into the heights, and indeed he felt a reverence that was almost religious. The feeling, however, was laced through with a sickening fear. “What could it be for?”
“This is what the dam is meant to power,” said Vedala. “It’s also the only man-made equipment I’ve seen besides the turbines.”
Stone approached the steel platform. He felt a warm hand take his and looked down to see Tupa. The boy had been through a lot in the last two days, but right now his expression was one of curiosity. It was an impulse that James Stone shared. Together, they walked slowly toward the center of the room.
The man-made platform was floored with metal grating, and it wrapped completely around the central hexagonal pillar. Footings had been placed around the edges, perhaps to support an enclosure that hadn’t been fully installed yet. The rest of the room was littered with wooden crates. Some containers had been opened and emptied, but others were still wrapped in heavy canvas, stained with mud and water. It looked as though they had been parachuted into the jungle, along with the rest of the equipment used in the power station.
“Whatever it is,” said Stone, “it isn’t completely finished.”
Vedala was already standing on the platform. Her head tilted back in awe, she was looking up through the hole in the ceiling. For an instant, Stone found himself thinking she was beautiful there, captured in the dim light falling from above, her smiling face bright beneath a tangle of reddish-black hair.
“What do you see?” he asked, approaching.
“Something that’s never existed on this planet before,” she replied.
Joining her on the platform, Stone gazed upward.
The shaft and the central pillar housed within it proceeded upward for what looked like a mile. At the top, a pale blue dot of sky shone.
“How . . .” asked Stone, trailing off.
“It must have been growing, along with the rest of the anomaly,” said Vedala.
A speck of cloud passed far overhead, and they felt the room cool slightly. Their hands found each other. Standing together, the two scientists silently contemplated the wonder of this structure.
“Jahmays,” said Tupa.
The boy was sitting on a rolling office chair in front of an instrument panel. It had been fitted against the far wall like a long desk, with exterior conduit running to the central platform. Self-consciously letting their hands go, the scientists joined the boy.
“It’s a control panel,” said Vedala, running her fingers along the metal surface. She studied the simple scattering of buttons and levers for a long moment, frowning. Finally, she turned a key and flipped a switch.
The panel lit up and began to hum. Tupa shot back in his rolling chair, cackling with surprised laughter as it rolled smoothly over the floor.
“It’s got power,” said Vedala. “Maybe that platform spins like a centrifuge? Or the spire could be some kind of communications antenna?”
“No, that doesn’t seem right,” responded Stone. “Why would it need so much electricity? Why build a million-ton structure and leave it under a lake? None of this makes any damn sense. Maybe Odhiambo would know . . .”
Stone stopped, remembering the last squeeze of his arm, the feel of losing his friend in the cold black water.
“It’s okay,” said Vedala, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to figure this out. Who better than us?”
Stone smiled ruefully. “A couple of overeducated scientists? You’re right. Who better?”
“Jahmays,” called Tupa.
The boy was using a metal bar to paddle himself across the room in the desk chair. Rowing toward them, he looked utterly ridiculous. Nonetheless, he had a very serious look on his young face as he slid out of the chair and put down the improvised oar.
Tupa pointed at the spire, then looked back at them.
Using his hands, Tupa drew a vertical line in the air, then moved his hands up and down the imaginary length of it, clenching and unclenching his hands as if he were climbing a rope.
Stone stared, uncomprehending. He glanced over at the last canary drone where it lay like a dead bird, beyond repair. He shook his head.
“Rope?” ventured Vedala.
Tupa smiled, pointing again at the central pillar that rose through the shaft and then continuing his gesture.
“I don’t understand. Why rope? What’s it for?” asked Stone.
Tupa shook his head and spoke slowly in his own language, still moving his hands in a climbing motion.
“A rope,” said Vedala, making a similar motion, “is to climb.”
“Climb,” said Stone, miming the gesture and then putting his hands up in a shrug. “To where, Tupa?”
Beaming, Tupa pointed straight up. He stood on his tiptoes, stretching his entire body taut and pointing as high as possible. Then he began to wiggle his fingers over his head, lowering them, watching the scientists with wide eyes.
The boy stopped, seeming very proud of himself.
“The stars,” said Vedala, an astonished smile growing on her face. Vedala turned to Stone. “A rope to climb to the stars.
“The kid is right,” she said. “That spire is a tether. It’s meant to connect to a rope hanging down from the heavens.
“Kline has built a space elevator.”
Finger of God
AMATEUR REPORTS OF A FIRE IN THE SKY WERE INITIALLY dismissed out of hand by major news agencies. Sporadic messages on social media were ignored. It was the now-infamous “finger of God” video that finally caught the world’s attention.
The shaky seven minutes of footage was taken from a smartphone held in the sweaty palm of Sra. Rosa Maria Veloso. She was on a flight from Buenos Aires to Tapatinga to visit her sister and nephews. That morning, TAM Flight 401 happened to be crossing over the Amazon jungle at an altitude of approximately thirty-five thousand feet. The sunrise—Sra. Veloso’s intended subject—was spectacular, painting the endless canopy below in daubs of fire and shadow.
But it was not the reason this video went viral.
“Dios mío” could be heard, repeated by different voices around the plane.
Just above the starboard wing, a miles-long curve of red light was slowly rippling across the upper atmosphere. Shining like a rind of flame, the arc resembled a crack in the dome of the heavens. It flowed downward like a molten waterfall, tracing its way across the sky as it continued to grow.
The miraculous material had accumulated many tons of mass at this point. Only a few atoms thick and as wide as a sheet of paper, it had grown to an incredible length of over twenty thousand miles. V
isible only as a streak of light, it hung like a mirage, seeming to waver without moving.
It was a sight that many on board Flight TAM 401 would go on to describe as “biblical.”
And yet the ribbon had been built by a mortal woman.
Composed of AS-3, the tether was shimmering as it reproduced itself at an astonishing pace. On reviewing the “finger of God” footage, experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory theorized that the Andromeda Strain was fueling itself by consuming molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere.
Seismic data collected from Brazilian radar installations placed along the border of Peru were also able to confirm that the ribbon was producing a continuous sonic boom along an entire fifteen-mile segment—a crackling thunder that was faintly audible across much of the southern hemisphere.
The top of the ribbon descended from a gleaming dot, visible from the ground only through telescopes. It was the International Space Station, located just beyond geostationary orbit over this exact point on the equator, and supporting the mass of the ribbon with the centrifugal force of its five-hundred-ton bulk. Kline had long since activated the Progress cargo module thrusters, as well as those of the solar electric propulsion device, pushing the ISS through a classic Hohmann transfer orbit and into this special position.
At an altitude of exactly 22,236 miles, an object’s orbital velocity and period reach a sweet spot that almost perfectly matches Earth’s rotation. The tether’s center of mass was located at this point, and it was growing both down and up at the same time. This resulted in a stable orbit that kept the ISS hovering directly above a single familiar point on the planet’s surface—the anomaly.
Kline’s plan was culminating in a literal blaze of glory.
The ribbon trailed over the Amazon, the sheer weight of it overcoming the effects of variable winds. In an incredible feat of coordination, its leading edge had reached a specific spot above the jungle: a black spire, rising a mile into the sky from a circular brown lake.
The “finger of God” video did not directly capture the moment of contact. But just above the jungle canopy, the gossamer ribbon was sweeping over the treetops toward the black spire. Made of the same material, they seemed to exhibit a magnetic attraction to one another. The ribbon was out of sight as it touched the spire, sending a burst of light and energy that flared in all spectrums.
The two fused on contact.
In the video, reflections of the energy burst could be seen racing across the sky like heat lightning. The long arc of the ribbon faded to a silver line of light that seemed to bisect the heavens. And then the glowing line simply winked out, leaving only pale pink morning sky.
Slowing down, the material had cooled and faded to a near-invisible black. It was now an incredible umbilical cord reaching from the International Space Station to its anchor point on the ground.
The AS-3 material held its structure, even under the titanic force of its own weight and the pull of a five-hundred-ton counterweight.
In the final frames of the video, Sra. Veloso had lost sight of the ribbon, but the camera remained trained on the wing where it was last seen. In the background, a hushed conversation could be heard, in a mix of Portuguese and Spanish.
Translated to English, the last words spoken in the video were not far from the truth. “My god,” said Sra. Veloso. “The heavens are broken. It is the end of the world.”
Realignment
AFTER FIVE DAYS OF CONTINUOUS EMERGENCY OPERATION, the team at Peterson AFB was growing haggard. The normally pristine control room was littered with empty paper coffee cups, mounds of research material, and hundreds of scribbled notes. The console operators on the “orbit one” shift, from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., wore lines of exhaustion under their eyes that the promise of overtime pay could not erase.
At the command console, General Stern was coming to terms with the nightmarish knowledge that one of his Wildfire team members had gone rogue on board the International Space Station. Compounding that disturbing fact was his missing field team on the ground. Stern’s assumption at this time was that his career was over.
He had failed, utterly.
A preauthorized backup field team had been dispatched when the primary team had missed rendezvous. But the beta group was currently anchored at the quarantine line and moving at a snail’s pace. Meanwhile, foreign governments had been paying attention, and rumors of something in the Amazon had finally begun to leak. Countries around the globe were scrambling teams of commandos, scientists, and flocks of every variety of journalist—all of them pouring into Central American airports. The mayor of the British territory of Bermuda had even sent a group of alien linguists.
Stern sighed, feeling the sidelong glances coming from his room of worn-out analysts.
Thankfully, news of the ISS going dark had been explained as a training exercise. The constantly patrolling American fighter squads over the Amazon had dissuaded any unwelcome visitors from penetrating the jungle quarantine, including a limited Brazilian Air Force. And the unlucky passengers of TAM 401 were currently sequestered on the tarmac at a military airstrip in western Bolivia. Stern estimated the civilian eyewitnesses could be held for the rest of the day, but not longer.
Unfortunately, the “finger of God” video had already been shared online.
The only recourse had been to hand the video situation to military information support operations. Formerly known as psyops, these air force veterans had moved beyond dropping leaflets from transport aircraft years ago. Now, multiple task force groups were busy generating misleading articles in multiple languages, using AI to generate “deep-faked” versions of the original video and spreading a series of conspiracy theories about the true intentions and background of poor Mrs. Veloso on all types of social media.
Stern resisted the urge to sigh again.
The general understood keenly that it would only be a matter of time before an international incident was triggered. The likelihood of a military conflict had increased to over 90 percent, according to an event chain simulation report sitting on his desk. The highest likelihood was a territorial dispute between Brazil and the United States, fomented by the action of disguised Russian or Chinese actors infiltrating the area.
All attempts to contact the International Space Station had failed, and it was impossible to send more astronauts without cooperation from the station. The field team was also impossible to reach, and had been since their last desperate message was discovered. In short, Stern was out of ideas.
That was about to change, for better or worse.
Stern later described the moment the call came in from Sophie Kline as one of immense relief. “Everything up to then was standing on the gallows with a rope around my neck. I was glad when she called. It meant the lever had been pulled, and I could finally get it over with.”
An encrypted message from the ISS came through at UTC 11:04:11. General Stern promptly took it offline and into his backroom office, away from the looming monitors and room-wide main speaker loop. Watching him through the window glass of his small office, analysts noted among themselves that Stern exhibited no reaction during the call besides weariness.
Stern began the call by waiting fifteen seconds as Kline determined how she was going to compose her message.
“Go ahead,” he urged. “Out with it, Kline.”
“General Stern. You can’t be very happy with me right now.”
The general snorted. It was quite an understatement.
“But I don’t need you to be happy. I only need you to understand,” she continued. “You and everyone else are afraid the Andromeda Strain will be weaponized. What I have to tell you is that its true purpose is not as a weapon. In actuality, the Andromeda Strain is an immensely powerful tool.”
“Kline, listen to me,” responded Stern. “You’re brilliant, but stand down. Give this up, whatever it is. You can’t make unilateral decisions for an entire species—”
“Then who does? You? Another m
an in a uniform? Today, I am making the decision. And I choose freedom.”
“You’ve chosen treason,” he pointed out, wearily.
The conversation had gone quickly off the rails. Stern’s hopes for a rational resolution were fading. He was beginning to suspect mental illness was playing a large part in this situation, based on Kline’s grandiose language.
Which is why what happened next was so stunning.
It is well known among security specialists that the majority of hacks are not carried off by reprogramming computers, but by manipulating the human beings who control the computers. In other words, hacks are usually carried off through convincing conversation, which is in itself a complex skill. Advanced social engineering requires meticulous preparation and a deep knowledge of your subject.
In this case, Kline demonstrated both.
In particular, the astronaut seemed to understand that Stern, as the father of four children, had a practical and rather plodding defensive mindset. The brunt of his focus had always been on protecting his nation from the machinations of other people, above all else.
“We must protect our country, General,” she said. “At some point in the past, our atmosphere was seeded with a hostile extraterrestrial microparticle. For over fifty years we’ve known about it . . . and been able to do nothing. The struggle of trying to understand the Andromeda Strain became its own fight. Questions that were once complicated and profound eventually became very simple: Which nation will figure out Andromeda first?
“Well, I have your answer. We did. The United States of America.”
The general was listening now. He was listening very intently.
“Get to the point,” he urged.
“I made a key and I unlocked the door, General. The knowledge of how to reverse-engineer the Andromeda Strain is inside my head; the data is inside the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module on board this station; and the experiment itself is unfolding on a grand scale over one of the most uninhabited areas on earth. The Amazon basin is a sacred ecological hub where any nation will think twice about deploying nuclear weapons, and it’s the place where we can most efficiently reap the benefits of our discovery.”
The Andromeda Evolution Page 21
