The Andromeda Evolution. Michael Crichton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ