The Andromeda Evolution

by Michael Crichton

“We’d have to strip it down to a metal catwalk and the motors,” said Vedala, inspecting the climber. “That leaves no room for life support. The vacuum will kill us, if the cold doesn’t get us first.”

  Stone was staring at her carefully, gauging her reaction. Under one arm, he was now cradling a bulbous white helmet. With his other hand, he had pulled a Z-3 space suit out by its neck, spilling packing peanuts across the floor.

  “Luckily, we have two spacecraft right here,” he said.

  “No,” said Vedala, eyeing the suit.

  “I’m afraid yes,” replied Stone.

  A half grin had settled into his thinly bearded cheek. His eyes shone with excitement and fear. Leaning over the suit, he began brushing it off.

  “We won’t have much shielding,” he added, “but we’ll be warm and we’ll be able to breathe. The faster we go, the better, since we’ll have to travel right through the Van Allen radiation belt.”

  Vedala paused, watching him to see if he was serious. He was.

  Slowly, she also began to smile. Stone’s excitement was contagious. She stared at the helmet with an almost sickening thrill building in her stomach.

  “This is doable, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Technically, it’s doable,” he replied, looking up at her. “It’s insane. But it’s doable.”

  “Then that’ll have to be enough,” said Vedala, putting a hand on Stone’s shoulder. “We’re all that’s left of Project Wildfire, Dr. Stone. Let’s go finish our mission.”

  AS VEDALA ACTIVATED the control panel, Stone began to shove cargo boxes off the climbing platform, delighting Tupa, who nimbly avoided the wreckage as each wooden crate crashed to the ground. Once the platform was empty, Stone sparked a portable acetylene torch he had discovered in a tool crate, pulling a pair of welder’s goggles over his eyes.

  It was time to make those deletions.

  With a few precise cuts, Stone began stripping off chunks of nonessential infrastructure. A haze of smoke from the torch soon rose, and a pile of twisted metal began to build around the robotic climber. Stone was careful to stay away from the motors and the central infrastructure, but everywhere else he was ruthlessly efficient.

  As he worked, Stone was wondering what they would find at the other end of the tether. Hopefully, a makeshift docking bay. If that hadn’t been constructed yet, they could end up climbing straight to their deaths—in a collision with the ISS that would likely kill them, Kline, and the rest of the astronauts on board. Or perhaps they’d suffocate in their suits while searching for a way in.

  It was a risk they’d have to take.

  The ribbon at the top of the spire continued to make its curious singing sound as they worked.

  “What do you think that noise is?” asked Stone.

  “Probably the sound of the tether growing,” replied Vedala. “From a nanotech perspective, the closest analog is bird bones. It’s amazing, really. Their bones naturally deposit calcium where the stress is greatest. Keeps them light and strong. My guess is the Andromeda material is doing the same thing. Self-replicating in places where the stress is tearing it. That would be the middle of the tether. As the particles self-replicate under extreme stress, the entire ribbon vibrates. Basically, we’re hearing the longest guitar string ever made.”

  Ultimately, it was decided to remove even the heavy metal casings from the motors. The platform was reduced to the rolling-pin climbing mechanism, an exposed electrical motor, and a narrow skirt of metal grating.

  By this time, Vedala had worked through the operation of the control panel. It was exceedingly simple. A lever to activate power to the climber and then a launch button to send it up to the ISS. Vedala theorized that Kline had designed it to be basic enough for an amateur to operate.

  And she planned to test that theory.

  As Stone and Vedala prepped the pair of space suits, Tupa was growing more sullen. Sharing a look with Vedala, Stone paused and approached the boy. Kneeling before him, Stone shook his head sadly.

  “I’m sorry, Tupa,” he said, explaining the best he could. “No kid-size suits. No . . . armor.”

  Tupa turned away angrily.

  Stone put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, gesturing with his other hand. “I will come back, Tupa. I will find you. I promise.”

  Without the translating drone, Stone had to hope Tupa would understand the gist of his words. The boy refused to look at Stone, hair hanging in his eyes. He was scared and sad and trying not to show it.

  Stone stood up.

  “I promise,” he repeated.

  “But we do need your help,” interjected Vedala, motioning to the control panel. She spoke slowly, using her hands. “Do you want to push buttons?”

  Looking over at the glowing red buttons, Tupa couldn’t help letting out a small smile of anticipation.

  “Bottons?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Vedala. “But very, very carefully.”

  Destination ISS

  WITHIN HALF AN HOUR, THE TWO SCIENTISTS WERE fully enclosed in the Z-3 space suits and perched on the narrow platform that ringed the climber, their legs dangling over the edge, like two children on a swing set. Each was secured to the metal grating with an improvised safety belt made of rope and tether hooks, looped through the Z-3’s hip anchor points.

  Stone could feel the electrical power coursing through the bones of the platform, thrumming through his entire body. The interior of the helmet was spacious, and the visor perfectly clear. A radio was embedded in the metal collar ring where the helmet connected to the suit, and he could speak easily with Vedala on a local channel selected with a chest-mounted control knob.

  At the moment he chose not to speak, as he was concentrating on not throwing up the MRE he had just eaten.

  It occurred to Stone that this is what astronauts must experience as they waited for liftoff on the landing pad—ready to risk life and limb to climb to the stars. He felt a squeeze on his hand and looked over to see Vedala smiling at him through her own fear. She had lifted the reflective visor layer on her helmet so that her face was visible, and to Stone she looked very small and very brave.

  “You ready?” she asked, her voice transmitted over the local radio and into Stone’s helmet.

  “Not even close,” said Stone, squeezing her hand back.

  Vedala nodded, then turned to Tupa. She gave the boy a thumbs-up.

  As they had practiced, the boy punched the correct button. The lever had already been set to the proper velocities—a slower speed for atmospheric travel, then accelerating to top speed once in the frictionless vacuum of space.

  “We’re doing this,” said Vedala, as the platform shivered. “We’re really doing this—”

  The climber leaped upward.

  The two rolling pins at the top rotated, accelerating rapidly, clamped tightly against opposite sides of the spire. Before he could catch his breath, Stone watched Tupa’s small upturned face recede below.

  And then the boy was gone.

  With gut-wrenching speed, the platform launched straight up along the spine of the spire. They were accelerating at a breathtaking five Gs for approximately five seconds, the smooth interior walls of the shaft flying past like highway pavement only an arm’s length away. When they reached the top of the spire, a startling jolt rocked the platform as the climbing mechanism clamped down on the thin ribbon tether.

  The platform abruptly transitioned into bright daylight.

  Vedala and Stone blinked in stunned disbelief as they emerged from the darkness of the shaft into a vivid blaze of green and blue light. For an eyeblink, the lake was stretching away around them, flat and mysterious. Then it was replaced by the emerald-green roof of the jungle beneath a dazzling, clear blue sky.

  The wind hit them both like an invisible sledgehammer.

  The Z-3 suits were not incredibly aerodynamic, and the platform had already accelerated to a brutal speed. The violent turbulence was shocking in both intensity and volume—pinning both scientists
to their seats, mute and paralyzed.

  Gloved fingers clinging to the metal grating, Stone held his breath and felt the quivering of the platform against his back and thighs. Fat drops of condensation streaked over the exterior of his helmet visor as the humid jungle air washed over him. He could feel hot sunlight raking over his chest, and also the veins of cool water flowing over his skin through the webbing of the suit’s coolant system.

  He looked upward through his visor.

  The ribbon filament tether curved away to dizzying infinity. It was bent at a slight five-degree angle westward, Stone realized—a result of the Coriolis effect of the spinning planet. When he glanced back down, Stone could glimpse the channel of rushing river water as it poured through the front of the dam. The trail of water quickly faded into a brown scribble. In seconds, the massive bulk of the anomaly had been reduced to a black dot far below.

  Moving at top atmospheric speed, the platform had reached five hundred miles per hour—a relative crawl compared to the eighteen thousand miles per hour required by rocket-based launches into space. The ascent was steady and smooth, ripping through the dense lower atmosphere and set to reach low Earth orbit in minutes.

  Vedala and Stone were undertaking a challenge completely outside the human experience. The scientists were piloting a novel mode of transportation on its inaugural voyage, an achievement on par with the first powered flight. They were living proof that science fiction can mature into science—that simply dreaming a thing, no matter how incredible, is the first step to bringing it into reality.

  “Good?” asked Vedala. Her voice echoed in Stone’s helmet, barely audible over the rush of wind and the thrum of the electric motors. Stone managed a shaky thumbs-up.

  The space suits’ portable life support systems activated in response to the environment around them. Thermal regulation clicked on, warming the water-filled tubes laced around their bodies. Oxygen was already circulating in the suits, and excess carbon dioxide was being scrubbed, both providing air to breathe and pressurizing each suit against an already dwindling atmosphere. On the exterior of each helmet, low-energy LEDs illuminated.

  Looking to Vedala as they tore through a cloud bank, all Stone could see were her helmet lights flickering through a rush of pale mist.

  Emerging above the cloud, Stone saw that in just a few seconds they had transitioned from a skyscraper view of the anomaly to a view of the Amazon from the world’s highest mountains, and finally to seeing Brazil from the height of an aircraft—albeit one dangling from a string.

  The intimidating Amazon jungle sprawled beneath them, cloaked in low-hanging clouds bathed in golden daylight. From here, the jungle terrain that had felt endlessly claustrophobic an hour ago was no more. The once fearsome rain forest had revealed itself to be delicate and finite, already fading away.

  One minute and twelve seconds into the journey, the climber had reached an altitude of nearly forty-two thousand feet above Earth. Through streaks of water and the tissue-paper shreds of clouds screaming past, the scientists could see only their own legs hanging over an unthinkable drop. They lingered in this gray purgatory for seconds that felt like hours.

  And then the reverie exploded into chaos.

  A dark shape loomed in the cloudy distance, moving fast. Stone shouted “What—” over the radio, before he was drowned out. A Russian-built Sukhoi Su-57 fighter jet had shrieked past the tether at a distance of only a hundred feet. It was followed almost instantly by an American F/A-18E Super Hornet in hot pursuit. The two supersonic jets, each moving at over a thousand miles an hour, produced a double shock wave that sent a vicious shudder through the ribbon.

  For a split second, Stone caught the wink of sunlight off the helmet visor of a pilot who was looking up, watching them in awe.

  Vedala and Stone clung to the ledge, straining the tether hooks they’d used to keep themselves attached to the platform. Engulfed in a blinding white haze, with fighter jets screaming past, the scientists could only huddle together.

  Ten seconds later the platform emerged above the pillowy cloud.

  In an iconic long-distance photo taken by a Brazilian reconnaissance plane at the extreme top of its operational ceiling, the two survivors were seen one last time during the ascent—two tiny specks of white-gold humanity, seated side by side as the glinting metallic platform rose, clinging to a line of silver light over a surreal landscape of billowing white clouds.

  Below them, swarms of fighter jets still jockeyed with each other for position over the Amazon jungle—each pilot waiting on orders. A frenzy of diplomatic overtures and dire threats was unfolding between nations. By all indications, the world was on the brink of war. And rising above this churning scrum of billions of dollars of advanced military hardware was a delicate line of ribbon filament. This tether to the stars had emerged in five days to become the most valuable structure ever built—worth more than every grand pyramid, ornate medieval castle, or towering superskyscraper combined.

  With no guidelines established and no forewarning, the international bureaucratic apparatus had been caught off guard. This leap into the future had happened too fast. Ultimately, no nation was prepared to pull the trigger.

  Despite all the noise and confusion, nothing happened.

  Lethally armed jets thundered to and fro in the cloudy depths below, the roar of their engines receding, their diminishing shock waves reverberating through the tether long after they were lost from view. The shadowed predators snapped at one another, bared their metal fangs, but they did not strike.

  Now the danger lay above, not below.

  An eerie silence had set in as the atmosphere diminished. There was no longer enough air to transmit sound. The roar of the wind faded. Now, Stone and Vedala could feel more than hear the muted singing of the ribbon and the whine of the electric motors pulling them inexorably higher.

  The sight of the ground far below had transformed into an abstract painting, too far away and beautiful to inspire a true fear of falling.

  Vedala finally lifted her gaze and gasped when she saw the horizon. It had been only about six minutes, hardly enough time to catch her breath from the stomach-wrenching initial acceleration. Earth’s curvature was already visible in nebulous shades of blue and white. The climber had passed through the ozone layer and into the mesosphere, miles higher than any spy aircraft or weather balloon had ever traveled.

  In this silence and stillness, it had just become clear that Stone and Vedala were leaving the planet and all its inhabitants behind.

  Stone spoke. “It’s amazing,” he said. “Beyond beautiful.”

  The two remaining field team members stared in awe at the world as they had never seen it—an expanse of twinkling ocean, wrinkled mountains, and a horizon of brilliant light where all color and beauty faded into the cold emptiness of outer space.

  “It is beautiful,” responded Vedala. “Seven billion people living under that thin layer of atmosphere. It looks so delicate and fragile. Because it is.”

  A few more minutes passed in mutual appreciation before they turned back to the job at hand.

  “Do you think Kline can be reasoned with?” asked Stone. “Can she undo what she’s started?”

  “No. What’s done is done.”

  “How are we going to fix this?”

  “We’re not, James,” replied Vedala. “The Andromeda Strain is like an oil spill. Once it’s happened, we can’t stop it. All we can do is try to contain it. We’ve got to try to keep it from spreading.”

  A sudden acceleration cut off the conversation.

  Earth’s atmosphere had been left behind, along with its gravitational pull. Blood was rushing to Stone’s head, bloating his face and clogging his sinuses. Eyes fixed on the ribbon above, his mental orientation shifted. Now it seemed as if he were falling away from Earth.

  In microgravity, he had lost all sense of up and down.

  Without any atmosphere to provide drag, the climber soon reached a velocity of over 7,500 miles
per hour. The only indication of the great speed was a trembling vibration.

  No stars were visible at first; the reflection of the sun on the Pacific Ocean washed out the sight of them. But soon countless pinpricks of light emerged: the combined output of a trillion other solar systems, stained reddish near the horizon and then melting into the faint bluish patina of the Milky Way.

  For just over three hours, the scientists bore silent witness to the raw beauty of the universe.

  A lurching deceleration was the only indication the platform was approaching its destination. The trip had carried them to an elevation of over twenty-five thousand miles. The dark bulk of the International Space Station loomed above, and the planet had receded to a blue marble far below.

  “Do you see it?” asked Stone.

  Fear was audible in his voice, even over the static-filled radio feed.

  The ISS was made up of a pieced-together collection of cylindrical modules, zigzag trusses, and acres of gracefully draped solar panels. It was the length of a football field, hovering dark and silent. Plumes of gas jetted from the Progress module as the ungainly structure continued to accelerate away from the planet.

  “Roger that,” replied Vedala. “We’re not a moment too soon.”

  The underbelly of the Mark IV Wildfire laboratory module had been clawed completely open. The ribbon disappeared into the broken module, forming a kind of dock. In the sharp light of the vacuum, Vedala and Stone could see where a patch of the module had turned a slick, wet-looking purple. The material was roiling and moving, as if parasitic worms were exploring under its skin.

  “The new evolution is here, and it’s spreading.”

  Docking Procedure

  THE PLATFORM REACHED THE END OF ITS TETHER AT UTC 17:02:42, slowing to a silent stop under the belly of the sprawling International Space Station.

  Stone and Vedala sat on the narrow ledge of the climber for a few moments. Their legs tingled as the steady vibration of the motor cut off and the platform went still. Moving awkwardly in their pressurized suits, they finally began to unsnap the seat belts they had rigged with NASA-issued tether hooks. In the immense silence their own breathing was loud in their ears.