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