The Darwin Variant
PRAISE FOR KENNETH JOHNSON
FICTION
“Johnson takes a big gamble by telling such a complex tale [in The Man of Legends] invoking every genre imaginable while juggling distinct and deep characterizations. The bet pays off, resulting in a story that will be popular with book clubs and fun to discuss.”
—Associated Press
“With The Man of Legends Kenneth Johnson has once again created a timeless tale that offers up adventure, suspense and romance all wrapped up tightly in a supernatural mystery.”
—Suspense Magazine
“A century-spanning story of spirituality and the search for meaning in a very long life.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Johnson successfully draws the reader into the emotional turmoil that his characters experience. Indeed, one of the strengths of Johnson’s writing is how much we come to care for the characters and their journeys . . . He is above all else a visually-oriented writer, and is intent on creating memorable visuals.”
—Book Pleasures
“Johnson is especially effective . . . at introducing disparate, unrelated stories and slowly having them collide with one another throughout the course of the story.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Without question Kenneth Johnson is the closest our generation will come to the great Rod Serling. His understanding of the human mind has created some of the most developed and understood characters ever. When Kenneth Johnson puts something out, it is always quality.”
—Scared Stiff Reviews
FILM
“The cerebral Kenneth Johnson, who created the [Incredible Hulk] series . . . went to great lengths to dramatize a cursed life—the kind chronicled in the novels of Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelley.”
—The New York Times
“Alien Nation is a bold move . . . Kenneth Johnson . . . creates a rich and fully invented world, and makes it pay off with well-developed characters and an interesting perspective on our own culture . . . It’s innovative.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Alien Nation is first-rate entertainment. Most of the success probably has to do with the fact that it was written, produced and directed by Kenneth Johnson.”
—The Seattle Times
“V—Victorious as sci-fi miniseries . . . Dazzling . . . An intelligent, imaginative, engrossing four-hour drama. V is a thought-provoking, sometimes shocking drama that keeps the viewer engaged.”
—The New York Daily News
“Right at the top we know that V isn’t just another fling at science fiction—it is nothing less than a retelling of history—the rise of the Nazis done as a cautionary science fiction fable. For television this is probably a first.”
—The New York Times
“Kenneth Johnson . . . succeeds in giving us an imaginative first-class thriller [V] of substance and social significance.”
—TV Guide
“Kenneth Johnson . . . knows how to make magic.”
—The Philadelphia Enquirer
ALSO BY KENNETH JOHNSON
The Man of Legends
V: The Second Generation
V: The Original Miniseries
An Affair of State
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Kenneth Johnson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
By Dylan Thomas, from THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS, copyright ©1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and by: David Higham Associates, Ltd., London.
Excerpts from ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell. Copyright 1946 by Sonia Brownell Orwell; Copyright ©renewed 1974 by Sonia Brownell Orwell. By permission of A M Heath & Co Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Imagine
Words and Music by John Lennon
©1971 (Renewed) LENONO MUSIC
All Rights Administered by DOWNTOWN DMP SONGS/DOWNTOWN MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC.
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard, LLC
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503954113 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503954110 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503948884 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503948889 (paperback)
Cover design by Damon Freeman
First edition
For David and Barbara Welch
and the memories, laughter,
inspiration and love . . .
CONTENTS
MISSION STATEMENT
1 ANOMALY
2 DEFENSE
3 STARFIRE
4 AWAKENINGS
5 CHANGELINGS
6 EVIL-UTION
7 TEAMWORK
8 CONSPIRACY
9 ALARMS
10 CONVERSION
11 REVELATION
12 HYPOTHESIS
13 ALLIANCES
14 CONNECTIONS
15 QUARANTINE
16 THE FRIENDS
17 CRISIS MANAGEMENT
18 PRIVATE LIVES
19 ADVANCEMENTS
20 DECEPTIONS
21 CRASH
22 HERMITAGE
23 UPRISING
24 OPPORTUNITIES
25 PASSAGES
26 MARTYRDOM
27 METAMORPHOSIS
28 MAYDAY
29 LEAP YEARS
Dr. Susan Perry-Smith, . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Portions of the . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MISSION STATEMENT
It is an honor to have been chosen by the Smithsonian Institution to undertake this project as a documentarian. I have endeavored to create a thorough and detailed record of the eighteen months that quite likely will stand as the most startlingly brilliant, but also the most diabolically dangerous days in recorded human history.
This narrative has been assembled from personal diaries, depositions, court documents, material gathered and transcribed from security cameras, dash-cam and body-cam footage, cockpit cam, voice and flight data recorders and television broadcast archives, plus previously classified interagency communications including data, graphics, and text transmissions. Much information came from direct interviews with the principals, who were also encouraged to recall and express their personal feelings, emotions, and opinions. I’ve tried to faithfully transcribe their voices, dialects, and speech patterns exactly as I heard them. The original audio and video recordings, along with all other relevant materials, are archived at the Library of Congress.
I am indebted to NASA, its Planetary Defense Coordination Office and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the State of Georgia and its police forces, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the US Departments of Justice and Defense for lending their full and honest cooperation. Also deserving at least honorable mention are the Central Intelligence and National Security Agencies, despite the many unhelpful redactions in material they supplied.
In particular I must express my ex
treme gratitude to research scientist Dr. Susan Perry of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and Katharine McLane, a native of the small town of Ashton, Georgia, and only fourteen years old when the menace began. Their unique personal perspectives were vital and inform this narrative most deeply.
These events would never have been accurately recounted if those two incredibly courageous people—and a great many of their brave compatriots—had not valued the future of humanity over their own personal safety and their lives.
This work is respectfully dedicated to them and to the heroic souls who did not survive.
K.J.
Palo Alto, California
1
ANOMALY
The Documentarian. . .
Something was coming.
If it could have been observed from a vantage point out in the silent, primeval darkness beyond the planet Mars, it initially would have appeared to be just another star. But it would have grown steadily into a larger smudge of light, slowly taking on the distinctive, classical shape of a comet.
As it came closer the spectacle would have become monumental. The head of the comet was a Mount Everest–sized mass of space rock and ice, its surface sparkling, churning with cyclonic intensity, buffeted by the invisible solar wind that gusted particles out behind to form its radiant tail.
The teeming ice crystals, swirling furiously in the electromagnetic solar gale, would have seemed frantically animated, madly alive. If their primal molecular voices could have been heard in the vacuum of space, they might have sounded like a trillion dangerous insects buzzing in a cacophony of discord.
We know now that deep within the comet’s rock and ice something was indeed living. Frozen solid in the near–absolute zero cold of interstellar space, it was nonetheless alive. And waiting.
The comet, with its gossamer tail trailing a thousand miles, would have been moving at astonishing speed: more than thirty-four kilometers per second. Forty-five times faster than a bullet. As the comet neared the inner solar system, the menace it represented was still unknown. But that was about to change.
Along with the course of human history.
Concetta Cordaro, PhD, 32, astrophysicist. . .
That November night I smiled as I looked up at the huge steel dome curving ninety feet over my head. As a ten-year-old in Cleveland, I’d clutched my thirty-dollar telescope, gazed deeply into the chilly night sky over Lake Erie, and fantasized about someday working at the great observatory atop California’s Mount Palomar. I had no idea it would take twenty years and be such a difficult climb.
The world’s most powerful telescopes, the “Big Eyes,” were greatly coveted by the Boys. Climbing into the viewing capsule at Palomar or Mauna Kea was a measurement of machismo. We female astronomers laughingly referred to it as “penile enhancement of astronomical proportions.” Even now at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it was easier for a woman to become a toreador than to get time at Palomar. But after thirteen months on the waiting list, here I was. And the weather was perfect.
I smiled with pride and delight, sipping my Constant Comment. The tea’s orangey fragrance was friendly, and the Star Trek mug was warm between my hands. I looked upward at the sixty-foot-long open-girder cylinder that cradled the magnificent two-hundred-inch mirror of the Hale reflecting telescope. The huge mechanism weighed five hundred tons but was so superbly balanced that only a one-twelfth horsepower motor was required to move it. My gaze traveled along the beautiful instrument, then across the gracious curve of the dome to the shutter, a ten-yard-wide vertical opening through which the telescope looked out toward the dark heavens beyond. For six nights that November, the Big Eye at Palomar was mine. Every time I thought about it, a bubble of pure elation rose up in me. I was savoring every single moment.
Right outside the door to the Palomar control room was a poster of the Milky Way with a “You Are Here” arrow pointing at the tiny dot which humorously represented our sun, one of a hundred billion stars. I smiled as I passed it and entered the control center. In the cluttered, piecemeal laboratory, over the years new equipment had been sandwiched in and jerry-rigged to interface with the quaint, older equipment. Some of it dated all the way back to 1948, when the telescope first became operational. Cables stretched chaotically through open overhead racks from one console to another, as computers and other equipment had been added, layered in, upgraded, and supplemented over the years. I particularly liked how fellow astronomers had humanized the room with personal notes, Post-its, and cartoons.
I plugged in the old dented kettle to make some fresh tea, then peeled off the new red parka I’d rewarded myself with for finally achieving Palomar. Beneath it was my favorite MIT sweatshirt, well-worn proudly since my first year in the doctorate program.
The room hummed and breathed with the various small cooling fans built into the equipment. The steady, reliable sounds were comforting. And, excitingly, they connected me to the infinity of stars beyond.
I brushed my dark hair back as I settled in at a binocular viewing device. I was using it to compare a digital photograph I’d just exposed with another photo I’d taken the previous night. But looking through the viewer, I frowned immediately. Something felt wrong.
“Wait. What?” I whispered.
My view through the eyepieces showed a narrow field of stars. As I clicked from one plate to the other and back, the points of light all remained stationary. Except one. I’d expected that. For the last several days I’d been in the midst of doing a spectrographic analysis of DF Tau, an intriguing binary star system 140 parsecs distant in the constellation Taurus. I knew that Avery’s Comet was due to pass through the foreground of my field of view, and had spotted it in my photos two days prior. But now it did not seem to be in the location where it should have been. I attached a tiny red locator arrow to it, whispering to the image, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be there.”
I carefully logged in the coordinates of the comet’s anomalous position and used Palomar’s ultra-high-speed 200 Gbps connection to search the MIT computer. I found the baseline of Avery’s well-documented orbit around our sun. Then I compared it to what I saw. The difference was disturbing. Unless I was mistaken, something was definitely wrong. The comet seemed outside its historic trajectory. I stared at the screen for a moment, then pushed a speed dial number, frowning. The man’s voice was sleepy. “Yeah?”
“Gary? Hi, it’s Connie up at Palomar. I’m on the Hale two-hundred-inch, and I’ve picked up an anomaly with Comet Avery. I mean, I can’t believe it’s right, but I’d like to jump on the JPL massive server and check some orbital dynamics projections.”
“Hang on,” he said, yawning. I heard him tapping a keyboard. “Hey, you still owe me another movie, Con.” I was barely listening, preoccupied by the unsettling image on my viewer.
“. . . What?”
“A movie.”
“Soon as I get back, Gare.” I was impatient. “Would you please—”
“Yep. Here y’go.”
In an eyeblink a stream of figures and graphs from JPL’s powerful mainframe suddenly wiped across my large screen. Then curving lines appeared, representing the orbits of the inner planets.
I carefully entered the coordinates of Avery’s position yesterday and then today’s set. The code set to work doing a UOD, updated orbit determination.
A new line began to creep across my screen, representing the trajectory that the out-of-place smudge on my photographic plate would likely follow. It arced from its present location in the vicinity beyond Mars and slowly traced across my screen toward the inner solar system. I knew the potent JPL computer was taking into account all the various gravitational factors acting upon the comet as it crossed through space.
Then I slowly began to have a premonition of where it was headed, felt my blood getting chilly. “. . . No . . .” I whispered, “No, no, no . . .”
On the other end of the phone, Gary sensed my concern. “What�
��s wrong? . . . Connie?”
But I was speechless as I watched the updating trajectory on my monitor continue its curving path inward. I stared at the screen, growing increasingly incredulous. Frightened.
Behind me the boiling teakettle began to scream.
The Documentarian. . .
Three days later an old Toyota pickup was barely holding together as it rumbled much too fast down the dusty backcountry road in Bangladesh. It ran between the rice paddies and thick, verdant, subtropical vegetation on either side. The truck’s paint had long ago been replaced by rust, the back window had no glass, the fenders were badly battered, and the bald left front tire threatened to come off each time it slammed violently into yet another pothole on the sunbaked road.
The driver, Daruk, a wiry Bangladeshi wearing a white lace skullcap, leaned on the horn, beep beep beeping as he wheeled into the small village of old stucco houses with corrugated metal roofs on the northern outskirts of Kalaganj. He dodged between lines of elementary schoolchildren. Like the other village people, some were dressed colorfully; others were more ragged and emaciated. The speeding truck sent scrawny chickens flapping aside as Daruk drove toward the makeshift hospital set up in military-style tents on a field along one edge of the impoverished village.
Lying in the back of the truck was an unconscious, painfully thin seven-year-old Bangladeshi girl. A clear oxygen mask was affixed over her face. A thirty-three-year-old Caucasian woman knelt over her, administering urgent CPR compressions. The woman’s T-shirt was soaked with sweat. From her ponytailed auburn hair to her faded jeans, she was grimy, covered with the dust of the road.
Dr. Susan Perry, 33, CDC epidemiologist. . .
I was pretty near exhausted. I paused the compressions on little Aniha to check quickly—and vainly—for a carotid pulse, then started cardiac massage again, pumping hard on her frail chest while I simultaneously scanned the compound ahead. I felt a touch of relief, seeing Lauren run out of the ramshackle field-hospital tents toward us. Dr. Lauren Fletcher was twenty years my senior and always reminded me of another vintage Lauren: Bacall. I was continually amazed how she managed to look imperiously blonde and attractive even in the jungle, even when she was near exhaustion, like I knew she was now. I shouted to her, “Cardiac arrest! The O2 ran out a mile back. I was making one last pass through Tarali and—”