It's A Bad Day To Be Human. After a U.S. government satellite lands in the town of Piedmont, Utah, two teenagers find it and take it back to the town. They open it and release a deadly microorganism, which is later codenamed Andromeda by the United States Army. A team is sent from the Army's bio-defense department to retrieve the satellite, only to die from the disease after stumbling upon a town full of dead bodies.
The video footage recorded by the retrieval team and their strange deaths capture the attention of General George Mancheck, the head of the bio-defense department, who activates "Wildfire," a team of five scientists who are called upon when high-level bioterror threats occur in the United States. The team, headed by its creator Dr. Jeremy Stone, manage to collect the satellite from Piedmont, where they also rescue a hysterical 60-year old man and a colicky baby who have survived the Andromeda outbreak.
In an isolated underground laboratory, the Wildfire team begins their examination of the Andromeda strain and the two survivors. The laboratory runs on a small water-cooled nuclear reactor, and in the event of a contamination breach, the lab is set to automatically initiate a 15-minute self-destruct sequence.
The scientists recover a sample of Andromeda on the satellite. They initially discover that the microorganism is contained within a delivery system of black buckyballs, a technology more advanced than anything known at present.
The team also theorizes that Andromeda must have an extraterrestrial origin, as it has no DNA or amino acids. Subsequent tests on Andromeda show that only dark conditions or exposure to infrared light slows the growth of the microorganism. Andromeda is an airborne microorganism that kills its host by entering the bloodstream through the lungs and almost instantly coagulates all the blood in the body, causing death within 10 seconds via a blood clot in the brain.
Those who manage to survive the blood clot become extremely violent and suicidal. It is revealed that the two survivors from Piedmont had not been affected by Andromeda because of their acidotic blood.
