Читать книгу The Andromeda Evolution - Michael Crichton - Страница 11

RAND L. STERN WAS ALREADY DEAD TIRED, AND THE day had hardly begun. A four-star general with a sprawling family and a rocket-powered career, Stern faced a constant and overwhelming demand for his attention. For his own part, he was simply looking forward to eating lunch for fifteen uninterrupted minutes.

Stern was a compact African American man in his fifties and only now going gray at the temples. A top graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he had spent thousands of hours as a command pilot in an F-16 Fighting Falcon, hundreds of those in combat. Afterward, he had done a stint as a professor at West Point. And for the last three years, he had been in charge of the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), after his nomination was confirmed unanimously by the US Senate in 2016.

Stationed at Peterson Air Force Base in central Colorado, General Stern oversaw the activities of thirty-eight thousand individuals concerned with monitoring and protecting American interests in the area from two hundred to twenty-two thousand miles up, a volume of space dwarfing that of the entire planet. His annual budget was in the tens of billions, twice that of any existing multinational company.

If asked, he would respond that his most complex command assignment was the parenting of four preteen girls alongside his wife, a research scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver.

At home, Stern’s voice was only one among many. At work, however, he spoke for over three hundred million American citizens.

In his first-day briefing packet, Stern had been informed of twelve high-priority ongoing top-secret projects of extreme significance to national defense. Among them was something called Project Wildfire, created in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident of some fifty years before. Wildfire had seemed like an innocuous footnote compared to the ambitions of the Chinese and the astonishing amount of unaccounted-for nuclear material that had been lost in orbit. Yet during his tenure, no other project had been a bigger thorn in his side.

Dealing with the Andromeda microparticle had gone from a purely scientific undertaking to a secret arms race with the sort of global repercussions not encountered since the height of the Cold War. As a result, Project Wildfire had grown to consume a disproportionate amount of resources. It had become a gargantuan feat just to hide its dozens of subprojects from the public view, costing billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.

All of it weighed heavily on the general.

In a later interview, he described the job as “feeling like Atlas, crouched there alone, holding the planet in my arms—and nobody knows what I’m protecting them from or why. Not even my girls.”

Among the classified downstream projects, the existence of Eternal Vigilance was peripheral at best. Serious fear of another spontaneous mutation from the Andromeda microparticle had evaporated over time. Instead, what was most important were the possibilities of intentional weaponization by enemies of the state.

In typical human fashion, attention had turned away from the wondrous contemplation of extraterrestrials and settled squarely and mundanely on the countries (allies and not) who had inevitably learned about the deadly version of the microparticle called AS-1, and its plastic-eating cousin, AS-2.

Both varieties had proven to be dangerous in their own ways.

Upon inhalation, AS-1 was almost always immediately fatal. The relatively benign AS-2 variety, which had evolved spontaneously in the heart of the Wildfire laboratory, had shown itself capable of lingering in the upper atmosphere, turning most plastics into dust—a development that had set back the US space program by decades. It also made AS-2 samples freely available to any nation with the scientific acumen to go up and collect them.

No other varieties of Andromeda, natural or manufactured, had been detected—though not for lack of trying.

And now, the call Stern had been dreading for years had come from an utterly unexpected direction—not from his agents scrutinizing the China National Space Administration, or the spies sent to investigate disease outbreaks around the world, or even from a certain secret clean room still buried under a cornfield in Nevada.

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; … <CONTINUES>

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.