The exploration was...we were unprepared for what we found. I don’t believe anyone could have prepared us—
Only four of us made it home safely. Three others died. Zack Stewart bravely...stayed behind.
Bangalore and Houston have tracked the Objects back to Keanu. We assume that these things were a kind of transport system—why they took you, we don’t know.
But we hope you are alive. We are doing everything we can to contact you and see what we might do.
For my son, Pav, if you are listening...be brave.
BROADCAST FROM MOSCOW MISSION CONTROL TO KEANU BY TAJ RADHAKRISHNAN
SEPTEMBER 3, 2019
There are 186 or 185 or maybe 180 of us, it turns out, depending on who’s gone bugfuck and killed somebody that I don’t know about.
We’ve got some food, a bit we brought along, other stuff we’ve found. Some water, same deal. And the clothes we were wearing.
THAT’S IT! No alien masters, no mission, no instructions...just a big habitat like a mall, only instead of a Gap or Martin Spencer or GUM...there’s one building we call the Temple.
We’ve had an election, and an American astronaut named Harley Drake won, though I don’t think he considers it winning. He’s a good guy; my dad mentioned him a few times. Got crippled in the same car accident that killed Megan Stewart, Zack’s wife and Rachel’s mom, which is how, I guess, he wound up babysitting Rachel and getting caught up with the Object.
As for the whole Megan Stewart thing...the fact that she was alive here when Zack and my dad got here, don’t ask me. No one seems to be quite sure how the fuck that could happen, or even if it did. I’m willing to believe it, because it’s no weirder than anything else I’ve seen.
I just wish someone would tell us WHY we’re here and WHAT THE FUCK WE’RE SUPPOSED TO DO.
And WHEN WE GET TO GO HOME.
This officially sucks.
I’m scared. I hate typing those words, but it’s true.
I’ve never been more scared in my life.
KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, ENTRY #2
THE PRISONER
The only way the Prisoner was able to maintain any mental stability was through routine. It would wake, it would eliminate, it would exercise, it would eat. It would then perform an examination of its prison, carefully pacing the x and y axes.
An objective observer would have called it foolish, because obviously the measurements didn’t change.
Except once, exactly seven sleeps back. During that waking period, the Prisoner had discovered that its chamber had grown wider and shorter, as if reshaped. In search of confirmation, it had measured the area seven times—and, allowing for slight variations due to the imprecise nature of his instruments—confirmed that the prison had indeed been reshaped.
It was the same sleep period in which the Prisoner had felt numerous anomalous vibrations in the wall and floor. Obviously there was a connection, but what?
On the next sleep, it performed the measurements again, and found to its disappointment that the chamber had returned to its previous dimensions.
There were no strange vibrations during that sleep period, either.
In one sense, the Prisoner was happy; it had concocted a dire scenario in which every successive waking period would show that the chamber was growing fatter and shorter by the same amount each day...until it found itself pinned like vegetative matter.
It had been quite easy to speculate, during the darker moments of that calculation, that this was how its Keepers would punish it...exile having been judged insufficient, they would simply, slowly, crush the Prisoner.
The threat vanished with the return to normal measurements, and left the Prisoner feeling even more despairing.
Because it could live for years, decades, in this chamber.
The second stop on the Prisoner’s waking routine—and the last before swim and sleep—was the special place on the outer edge of the chamber...it was where the builders had embedded tiny assemblers to apply heat, light and information to the raw materials of the habitat in order to synthesize food, skin, or other materials.
It was also where it expended its own waste.
The Prisoner had located certain tools. They had been woven into the fabric of its prison by Powers-Beyond-the-Keepers. The Keepers themselves would be greatly angered to know that their Prisoner was using them.
One tool allowed the Prisoner to leave the prison, for brief periods.
There was no access to the larger Keeper environment, of course, but there was a means of going another direction.
Out, to the bleak surface of the vessel.
Of course, this required protection and support, but the Powers-Beyond-the-Keepers had prepared for this, equipping each environment with adaptives, self-shaping garments that would provide protection for one cycle.
Donning one of the adaptives was a rigorous challenge, though not much more rigorous than challenges the Prisoner had faced and overcome while growing up in its birth habitat. Indeed, diving into the adaptive fluid had much in common with a rite that all had to endure before being allowed to divide: the triple, involving exposure to surface and air as well as sea. It was not meant to be fatal to participants, though it often was.
Donning an adaptive suit was not meant to be fatal, either.
Since this was the Prisoner’s fourth time donning the adaptive garment, the feelings of suffocation and loss of sight and hearing were almost familiar.
Once enclosed in the adaptive garment, out on the surface, the Prisoner had one cycle to find a weapon, a tool, anything to improve its existence.
ZACK
“I think this is going to be a giant waste of time.”
It had been two days since the vesicles had arrived on Keanu, one day after Megan’s burial, and Zack Stewart faced a wall, where Makali Pillay’s pronouncement was as obvious as it was discouraging.
“Hold on, for Christ’s sake,” he said, his voice ragged and harsh. “We just got here. We already know that these walls come and go.”
“I’d be happy to see you make it go,” Makali said. He had to fight the urge to turn on her and scream. Some microscopic vestige of his training and sense of command allowed him to absorb her sarcasm, charging it off to (a) the exhaustion and (b) the foreign accent.
Besides, Makali hadn’t already devoted an hour of her life to searching for a “missing” passage, as Zack had yesterday. He turned to his team, which, in addition to Makali, included Wade Williams, Dale Scott, and Valya Makarova. “Why don’t we all spread out and see what we can find.”
He immediately began probing the surface of the habitat with his fingers, which were scraped and filthy. He would have happily delayed a trip back to Earth for a ten-minute dip in Lake Ganges.
His last fatherly function had been to persuade Rachel to take her bath this morning. Harley Drake had set up a rotation for bathing—women one day, men the next. Logical, doable, for the moment. But Rachel’s participation? Not easy. “Daddy, it’s so gross!”
“It’s what we have.”
“But we’re drinking from it! We’re drinking from the same water all these...people are using!”
“Upstream.”
“What stream, Daddy? This is a...scummy pond.” He couldn’t argue on facts; his only appeal was, “You’re setting a bad example.”
That was the magic phrase, giving him victory, but at a cost. Rachel had begun stripping off her clothes, forcing him to turn away. His only real choice at that moment was to depart, heading back to where the new deputy mayor was trying to lead.
There he had run into Makali, Williams, Valya, and Dale Scott, several of the people he least wanted to see. Williams was busy sharing his extensive knowledge of life with Harley Drake, who wore an expression that proclaimed his disgust and indifference.
Makali Pillay was busy expressing herself in similar terms to Vikram Nayar, at least if body language was an indicator. She was half a head taller than the Bangalore flight leader...and far more
animated.
“Zack! Over here!” Harley had shouted, clearly searching for any way to shut Williams up. “When do you head off to see the Wizard?”
“Now. What about you?”
“First priority, checking on Gabe. He’s not looking too good.” Zack could see the new mayor leaning tiredly on the wall of the Temple, nodding as half a dozen people tried to tell him things at the same time.
“And the rest of us are?”
“There’s dirty and hungry and tired, and there’s sick. Morning, Wade!”
Zack realized that Wade Williams, the sci-fi writer who had somehow managed to be included in Harley’s alien Home Team, had joined them.
On first meeting the man, Zack had looked at Williams’s outfit, a safari jacket and rumpled khakis, topped with a floppy jungle hat, and judged it pretentious and ridiculous. Now he was less sure. Of course, living in a filthy space suit undergarment for a week had lowered his standards for male attire. He would gladly have swapped his long johns for anything from a Victorian frock to a spandex superhero costume. “I’ve been trying to persuade your friend here to let me accompany you on your exploration this morning.”
That had alarmed Zack. What he’d had in mind was a quick loop past the tunnels where the Houston and Bangalore groups had emerged from the vesicle “dock.” Makali was a good companion for the mission; anyone else would just be baggage.
“And I,” Harley said, smirking in triumph, “think that would be an excellent idea.”
“It’s a long hike,” Zack said, searching for a counterargument.
“Until going to Houston last week—or was it a hundred years ago?—I was regularly walking one point five miles every day. Or over three kilometers, for you Metric Nazis.” Even with his dirty khakis, ridiculous safari jacket, and smudged spectacles, Williams seemed determined. “I fancy I can keep up with you, Commander.”
“Call me Zack—”
“Besides, saving your experience of the past week, I’m still more familiar with exotic propulsion systems and concepts for alien spacecraft than anyone here. Before I started telling stories for my beer money, I worked at Hughes.”
Zack had no idea what that meant, but it was clear he was not going to win an argument. When in doubt, embrace the inevitable—
“Fine.” To Harley, he said, “Anything else before I go?”
“Just for grins, and since Weldon and Jones seemed unclear on the motivation, what are you hoping to accomplish here?”
“First, I get to see where you guys came from,” Zack said. “Your magic bubble spaceships.”
“You’re going to be disappointed; they sort of dissolved. We’re talking gone with the wind.”
“There must be something left.” Zack couldn’t believe that a vehicle capable of ferrying several dozen people across four hundred thousand kilometers could just vanish.
“Zack, it was nothing but a pile of powder.”
“That just makes no sense to me. Why build something so...so capable, then throw it away!”
Sasha Blaine had been lurking nearby. “Nothing in this place seems to be permanent. I mean, just look at this stuff.” She scooped up a handful of Keanu dirt and let it drizzle through her fingers. “I get the idea that if you just zap it with the right amount of energy, you can turn this into anything you want.”
Well, one shitload of energy...“It isn’t just, you know, add power.”
“I know that,” Sasha said, changing the subject while reminding Zack of every supremely bright, hyperfocused, slightly awkward grad student he’d ever known. “The goo still has to be programmed, doesn’t it? And I have no idea how.”
“From what you told us, Commander,” Williams said, “the Architects seem to be pretty good at managing information.”
Zack stared at him. Surely this pompous ass wasn’t going to use Megan’s resurrection as a debating point. He decided to end this now. “Well, even if all we find is white powder, we’ll have something to start with.”
Harley sensed the looming problem. “Hey, Zack, look at it this way: Human beings have been throwing televisions and computers away for years, rather than repair them or recycle them. Why should your friends the Architects be any greener?”
“Fine,” Zack said. He had a team of three now. He glanced at Scott and Valentina, who were waiting patiently.
“Why do I need them?”
“You don’t. I just don’t want Scott hanging around here all morning, spreading his brand of cheer. And his girlfriend is attached at the hip.” Then he said, for all to hear: “Since Valya Makarova is our exolinguist, it seems that she would be most valuable in your mission. Suppose you gain access to a passage. Suppose you find a message or one of those Keanu Markers. She’s right there; she can translate for everyone.”
Valya immediately protested. “Really, Mr. Drake, how can you promise something like that—?”
“I’m kidding, don’t worry. No one’s expecting you to be a human Baretta Stone.”
“I think you mean Rosetta Stone,” Dale Scott said.
“Either one.”
As they moved off, Zack kept his eyes on Harley. “And what about Dale?”
Harley pulled two Tik-Talks out of the bag on the side of his chair, handing one to Dale. “As you may recall, Zack, Dale here was quite the communicator during his astronaut days. He’s your radio guy.”
“Jesus, we’re just taking a hike.”
“It’s a couple of clicks. You don’t have to go real-time. In fact, given that the batteries can’t be recharged, you should call only if you need help.”
“I think I told some of you—or some of you heard me—that Megan and I made it to another habitat, a much larger one that looked like it contained a whole city of some kind.”
“How far away was it?” Scott said, still sounding reasonable. “From this habitat, I mean.”
“Had to be on the order of a couple of kilometers.” He pointed directly down the length of the habitat. “But it was on the other end there, and as of yesterday, it was blocked just as completely as this one is.”
“So, what, we just turn around and go back to the group?”
“We can’t simply do nothing,” Zack said. “We have no idea how long we can survive here. I want to know if we’ve got resources, and possibly a way out. I just have this feeling that there’s still a way to get everyone back home.”
“Why?” Valya said.
“Because someone brought us here. Someone built all this, adapted it for humans. Believe me, I saw it taking shape right in front of me. If there’s any order to the universe, this has to be some kind of test—we just have to figure out the rules.” His vehemence shocked him as much as it did his companions.
But Makali was saying, “Mr. Williams, what are you doing?”
“Feel that?” Williams said.
Zack realized he had grown aware of a pulsing hum. Troubling...Got it. “I remember now: I felt that same vibration in the Beehive.”
“The what?” Dale was looking at Valentina. Even Makali seemed confused.
“The place where Keanu seems to generate new life,” he said. He quickly explained about the cells and the second skins that covered the Revenants when they emerged.
Makali and Williams looked at each other. Scott and Valya, too. “What is it?” Zack said.
“To hell with the tunnel and the vesicles,” Williams said.
“Yes,” Makali said. “How far to this Beehive?”
RACHEL
“I suppose you were watching.”
Rachel Stewart found Pav Radhakrishnan fifty meters from Lake Ganges. He was hidden in the rocks, Slate in his lap, with his back to the water and the female bathers, but still: He was a boy, he could see naked women by turning his head. He would peek, count on it.
“What?” He pulled the buds out of his ears, startled by Rachel’s sudden vault into his field of view.
“All of us. The gir-ls,” she said, stretching the word to two syllables. “Without our clo
thes.”
He made a good show of acting surprised when he turned and saw that, yes, Lake Ganges and its current occupants were extremely visible. “Hey, you’re right. I could have seen all of you...the underage and the really old. In all your hotness, too.”
Rachel sat down next to him. She was hungry again. Breakfast had consisted of more crunchy vege-fruit, and not nearly enough. She had the feeling that wasn’t going to change any time soon. “What’s on your Slate?”
“The usual. Music, some school stuff—”
“Porn.”
Pav looked at her. For a moment, Rachel thought he was going to go all red-faced and defensive...but no. He blushed, yeah, but he also grinned. “Got my needs,” he said.
She took advantage of his momentary relaxation to snatch the Slate away. “Hey!”
She ran.
Her hair was still wet. In spite of total immersion in water, she felt greasy and dirty. Her flip-flops were not the ideal footwear for a race.
But bolting away from Pav and heading for the farthest wall of the habitat...well, it was the most fun she’d had in days. Her father always told her she was healthier and happier when she worked out—or got any type of physical activity at all. Maybe he was right.
She left Pav far behind as she raced through a stand of reeds so tall they were over her head, but spaced in rows. Which was kind of odd, though not insanely odd by Keanu standards.
Off to her left there was a dead patch. She avoided that, partly because she didn’t want to be seen in the open, partly because it looked...brown and white and spoiled somehow, like mold.
Then it was into a newish forest, short green bushes and trees.
The only sound she heard was her own breathing...and then, far off, barking.
That stupid dog again. All during her “bath,” Cowboy had insisted on splashing into the lake and either sniffing her or the nearest woman. A couple of the bathers, especially those from Houston, seemed okay with the idea, but Rachel had been furious.
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