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.

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.