Not one of the structures was truly optimized for human habitation. The Architect Dale had met was literally twice as tall as he was, and some buildings seemed suited for a being like that. Others had three floors where a human building would have one, suggesting that their inhabitants were really short, or very flat.
Dale’s ultimate “home” was an open area under the overhang of a building entrance. Given its nature, the Factory had no regular rain or fog . . . until the day it did, which came as a surprise.
It had happened only once or twice a year, but there was no predictability that Dale could see—no correlation between the sudden rains and occasional failure of the ceiling glowworms. (The first time Dale found himself in absolute total darkness, he had foolishly tried to run—slamming into a wall and breaking his nose.)
Fortified by his own solid if uninspired menu, Dale spent another two years using the Factory systems to learn about Keanu . . . where its power came from, how it propelled itself, how the transit system operated (or in this case, didn’t), how Keanu was able to create different gravity fields in the habitats . . . how it turned energy into the nanotech goo known as Substance K.
How it created the “vesicles,” the spherical space balloons that managed to launch off Keanu and land on Earth—then return with samples and humans. (Or launch off Keanu carrying a few hundred thousand Reivers . . . and never return.)
He never learned more than a fraction of what he wanted to know. No human could—and certainly no human rummaging through the system without a guide or a key.
One thing did strike Dale, however: Some of Keanu’s systems were off-nominal, either failed (the transit system) or failing (the weird reboots in the environmental support). That was certainly troubling . . . not that he could do anything about it.
Yet.
Eventually Dale tired of these explorations and decided to concentrate on experiments. More precisely, on making direct contact with Keanu itself.
The idea of Keanu being an individual wasn’t his—Zack Stewart suggested as much during that first week, after his own encounters with the Architect . . . whom Zack considered the voice of Keanu itself.
It was only contemplating the still-murky link between the Architect and the human Revenants that led Dale to agree with Zack’s conclusion. An entity the size of a small planet, with God only knew what sense of time passing, with a life span of ten thousand years, would naturally require some kind of avatar in order to communicate with tinier beings whose lives were limited to one hundred years.
One question had lingered for Dale: If Architect = Keanu, why the need for human or Sentry or Skyphoi Revenants? His familiarity with the Factory gave him one vital piece of information: The Architects were the original builders of Keanu, its first crew. So even a Revenant Architect was limited in its ability to communicate; thanks to its size and slower mental processing (compared to humans), it was still out of phase.
Then, considering the whole phasing business encouraged Dale to wonder about the microscopic Reivers. They seemed to have had solved the Keanu-Architect problem by combining into larger creatures. Which then made him wonder if beings the size and scale of Keanu did the same thing: Were there conscious entities the size of solar systems and even galaxies? He spent days pondering the matter, eventually tabling it for future consideration.
Dale tried the various Factory machines, searching for something that might serve as a communicator. He devoted the better part of a year to fabricating his own with the proteus, basing it on what he knew of telephones . . . and wound up with a clever piece of useless junk.
There were whole months when he ignored the systems and returned to his wandering ways.
Finally, after exhausting every other possibility, he had hit on a method worth trying . . . that of putting his body in direct contact with the NEO. He had tried it clothed, then naked. With unmarked skin, and tattoos.
He had lain down wet, then dry. Facedown, faceup.
Eventually it had worked. Eventually he found himself in a trance, experiencing visions, and visions that seemed to leave him informed, somehow. Connected.
The process had yet to work consistently or predictably, but now, here, tonight, in jail, Dale felt he had to try.
After a simple meal delivered by one of his guards, as soon as “night” fell and the HB community went into sleep mode—or whatever they did; they got noticeably quieter—Dale stripped off his ragged jumpsuit, leaving himself naked.
Thin to the point of scrawny, pale to the point of translucent, he looked like The Illustrated Man from one of his childhood books . . . except that the illustrations had been drawn by a blind person with no artistic talent at all, but an apparent fascination with various symbols, religious and technical—cross, Star of David, crescent, mixed with sigma and delta—and even a few from the world of magic.
It wasn’t just the self-made tattoos that made Dale’s body a visual horror, it was the piercings and homemade shunts.
He still had some Keanu-made wires sticking out of his midsection.
There was a floor to his jail hut, but it was made of light brown tiles that he was able to claw open. He peeled half a dozen of them off the floor, exposing the Substance K–derived regolith underneath.
Then Dale scraped out a shallow depression. Someone walking in on him would have thought he was digging a grave, but that someone would have been wrong.
The dugout portion wasn’t to commit his body to this alien soil—it was to enhance communication, the same way he had once struck old battery nodes together, knocking off corrosion to improve contact.
Arms at his side, Dale Scott lay on his back in the dirt of Keanu and commanded his breathing to grow shallower, freeing his mind, soothing his spirit.
Within minutes—or possibly an hour, he was never able to tell—he experienced the feeling that he was lying on his back on the surface of some object in space, hurtling toward the stars . . . it was a familiar sensation, one he had experienced many times as a child in his backyard in California, staring for a long time at the night sky.
But with full sensation. Cold and heat. Electronic pulses blasting through him just below the threshold of real pain.
And the sound inside his head, like the voices of all humanity and possibly beings beyond humanity.
At some point—he had never been able to determine how long this process took—he was in a receptive state, feeling as though his eyes were open and trying to watch a multitude of objects, some of them television or computer screens, others pages from documents, still others images, both still and moving, all accompanied by a cacophony of more familiar sounds . . . voices in a dozen languages, music, static.
But mostly screens.
It wasn’t all serene. Some images frightened him. Some sickened him. A few made him feel as though he were being assaulted.
It was as if some mechanism inside Keanu’s vast system were reading his thoughts—even sensing unconscious needs, which might explain the torrent of what a younger Dale Scott would call porn—and displaying data that matched it.
He saw snippets and samples of news reports broadcast from Earth. Even though the Keanu system seemed to bias its selections toward those Dale would understand, very few of these reports were in English, but since all were accompanied by graphics—images of the individuals in Adventure’s crew and the same shot, obviously a controlled info dump, of the spacecraft at its landing site—he could pick up some information.
He wondered where the American broadcasts were, but only briefly; he had learned that broadcasts from Free Nation U.S. were fluff and filler, cleansed of anything troubling or informational.