Then, as if the Keanu system moved up a level of difficulty, he was given a sample of blog posts and e-mails that mentioned “Rachel Stewart” or “Sentry” or “Adventure” . . . much as the National Security Agency’s I-Trap system had been able to collect similar items with keywords like “terrorism” or “C-4” or “suicide bomber” when Dale was a teenager. This was an endless stream, ninety percent of it consisting of people’s questions or observations to each other—eighty percent of that in languages other than English.
But there were nuggets. And just noticing those caused Keanu’s great engine to pin them somewhere in Dale’s internal dream vision, where he could concentrate on them. He was especially taken with blog posts from several groups in Australia—the word Kettering kept coming up. The word had historical connotations for Dale, though he could not remember them (and Keanu’s system had not shown an ability to rummage through his personal memories . . . so far).
Kettering posts seemed to have lots of information on Rachel and her crew . . . especially when Dale tracked them back to the source, and ran into encryption firewalls.
He had performed this exercise the night before, in the Factory, which was where he had learned that Rachel’s team was near Bangalore and the object of several different threats.
He formed a thought: Are they safe now?
And he was hit with such an intense flood of imagery and data that it made him cry out. He saw military vehicles—surface and subsurface ships. He saw drones ranging in size from a large airplane down to a hummingbird floating in a night sky. He saw an aerostat.
He saw surveillance images of city streets—Bangalore?
Then, another level up, where Keanu decrypted the feed from these sources and saw what they were seeing and feeding. Selected imagery from the drones, for example. Simple views of control rooms. Empty streets. Highways.
A distant facility—this Bangalore air base.
There were flashes of data from Kettering and its sources, too—the group seemed to have sources deep within at least one military organization.
Dale felt alarm—just as bad now as it was the first time. Poor Rachel.
Then his summoning of Rachel’s name created a link, somewhere in his mind, to Makali Pillay . . . all of them had been together on the Great Trek twenty years ago.
And here the imagery in Dale Scott’s dream state changed. It was no longer searched and filtered from sources on Earth; it was clear and close and direct.
It was information from inside Keanu.
He saw Makali Pillay—aged a decade, but still recognizably herself—wearing a bizarre costume of some kind as she floated in a habitat with several Skyphoi!
Even in his dreamlike state, he could chortle with smug satisfaction: You dumb bastards, you told me bullshit about Makali, so she stayed in my mind.
Makali led, in one of those odd little connections, to Zhao. Where had he gone?
He was elsewhere in Keanu, too . . . in a chamber Dale did not immediately recognize, but clearly working on something important and urgent.
Makali and Zhao—what was it?
He wanted to find them, go where they were.
He wanted out of this jail—
He opened his eyes now and saw that he was staring up at the “night” sky of the human habitat. The roof and walls of the hut had vanished as if they’d never existed.
Before he could sit up, a drop of rain hit him in the mouth.
It was followed by more rain.
He actually swallowed some water before feeling strong enough to get up.
When he did, grabbing his shabby clothes, all he thought was that a bit of rain might mean he was leaving tracks as he removed himself from the habitat.
No worry. Harley and the others, once they realized that their jail had disappeared and that they were no longer dealing with plain old Dale Scott, wouldn’t dare follow him.
Day Two
SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2040
QUESTION: What was there about life on Earth that you missed most?
PAV: Very little.
QUESTION: Seriously?
PAV: Look, throughout human history, most people lived their lives within a thirty-kilometer radius. Our habitat was pretty close to that.
QUESTION: That might have been true prior to the nineteenth century, but you were born in 2003. You grew up with travel and cities and commerce—
PAV: True. But on Keanu, we were mostly trying to survive . . . like humans born prior to the nineteenth century.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040
RACHEL
“It’s worse than we thought,” Pav told her, when they stepped out into their second Bangalore morning. Both of them blinked like prisoners released from a cell, even though the sky was overcast, threatening rain.
Rachel’s first night of Earth sleep in twenty years had been restful—she believed she had truly slept at least five hours—but for a series of strange dreams, including the predictable one in which she was still inside the Temple on Keanu, late to the launch of Adventure.
In another, she was back in the home in Houston she shared with her father and mother—though her current age. And Yvonne Hall, the astronaut turned Revenant, simply called her on the phone to tell her, “I’m here for you.”
Rachel had awakened at that point, feeling foolishly, possibly insanely reassured—the predictable residue of a dream.
Before beating herself up, however, she had to consider this vital point: All three of those people, Father, Mother, and Yvonne, had died . . . and two had become Revenants. They were proof that the Architects of Keanu had a handle on the existence of consciousness or personality beyond physical death.
Would it be crazy to assume that their technology extended to communication from beyond the grave? To invading your dreams with actual messages?
Rachel said to Pav, “Did you ever smoke?”
“Cigarettes? Of course I smoked! I spent part of my childhood in Russia! Why?”
“I never did,” Rachel said. “But right now . . . it’s supposed to help you think, isn’t it?”
“That’s what they say.” He put his arm around her. “You don’t need nicotine to help you think.”
“I feel as though I need something. A boost.”
“We’re sticking to our plan. Land, make contact, learn as much as we can, then—”
“Then move, yes. But so far we’re doing exactly what we expected, and that bothers me.”
“Because you’re a pessimist.”
“A realist.”
“Well, then, realist, keep this in mind: Our plan didn’t include having Sanjay get critically injured.”
Rachel sighed. “And what do we do about Sanjay? Leave him? And Zeds . . . trying to move him is just going to be difficult—”
“Zeds can move himself, and we both know it.”
“But not quietly or discreetly, darling. Wherever he goes, people are going to know.”
Pav frowned as he looked at her. “We’re going clandestine, are we? Maybe you do need to catch me up—”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. We need Xavier to do what he and Sanjay were going to do, and quickly. We need money, support, transportation.”
She sighed. “It’s been so strange to find . . . what we’ve found.”