Before Chang could respond, the proteus made a coughing sound, then stopped: No fluid moved in, and the piece of material stopped before it could fully emerge.

A foul smell filled the cabin.

“What the fucking hell—?”

“Back to the drawing board, I see.”

Xavier was torn between wanting to punch Chang, just for attitude and possibly distracting him, and wanting to run away. Not that it was possible to leave the plane.

It was just that Xavier had never known a proteus to fail.

And he was afraid that when it did, the next event would be spectacular and deadly.

He examined the unit, which was the size of an old-fashioned desktop computer with screen. Nothing appeared to be wrong; it had just stopped working.

But it was emitting wisps of smoke.

Xavier glanced at the pieces of the transmitter. Eleven were required; he had nine.

“How long to Guam?” he said to Chang.

“Four hours. Are we in danger?”

Xavier wasn’t sure, and even if he had been, he was not going to let Chang know. “Tell the pilot to fly faster.”

Of all the severe paradigm shifts attributable to the Destiny-Brahma encounters with Keanu—the proof of extraterrestrial life, the glimpse of a large galaxy-spanning conflict between two types of alien races, the demonstration of technologies sufficiently advanced from human experience to be totally magical—the one with the greatest impact and most far-ranging effects has been hard evidence that human personalities survive beyond death.

This single revelation, with the evidence of the four so-called Revenants, easily and unquestionably ranks as the most momentous in human history, displacing the discovery of fire or any other pretender to the throne. Entire religions—including those that have served as the most powerful and sustaining political entities in human history—have been founded on much less.

And yet . . . humanity has not been transformed by this knowledge. The established religions still exist, though some of their power and influence has been diminished.

One new movement—Transformational Human Evolution—has arisen, claiming to incorporate the Revenant concept in a new mode of ethics and actions.

But THE is still limited to Free Nation U.S. and a few allied countries. It is inextricably tied to the Aggregate aliens.

If only the human race had been free to truly explore the implications of the Keanu Revenants. But the arrival of the Aggregates has essentially frozen religious-moral inquiry even as it has brought political and technological evolution to a halt.

GERALD MCDOW, INTRODUCTION TO STASIS:

THE HUMAN RACE’S LOST LEGACY POST-2020,

CONTRACTED TO YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, UNPUBLISHED

YAHVI

For Yahvi, the trip from Bangalore to Darwin had already eclipsed the flight from Keanu as the worst trip in her life.

But now she judged Darwin to Guam to be worse than the first two combined. It was not only bumpier, but when the proteus started spasming, it became terrifying. She decided that she did not like travel and that she would be better off at home in the habitat.

At least there she wouldn’t be doing what she’d been doing for the past three hours, which was wondering how she was going to die. Would it be smoke inhalation? Or would the plane catch on fire, burning her and the others to death?

Or would it just dive into the ocean from an altitude of ten thousand meters? Yahvi knew enough about Earth history to know that all these things had happened to people—choking to death, burning in agony, smashing into the ocean at hundreds of kilometers an hour, breathing one second, the next . . . what? Blackness? Yahvi had fallen on her face once, and it was easy, she thought, to take that shock and pain and multiply it by a hundred or a thousand or infinity.

No, she couldn’t. The horror was beyond her imagining.

And while she knew her grandmother and a handful of other humans had come back from being dead, they hadn’t lived very long—and not very happily, either.

It had been several years since she had confronted this issue. The last time was when she was twelve—

Over the years, the HBs had transformed a small corner of the habitat into a human cemetery. Here, Yahvi knew, was where her grandmother Megan Doyle Stewart was buried, as well as a dozen HBs who had died in accidents or of various ailments since 2019, especially Daksha, the Bangalore engineer everyone loved. Also one of the yavaki, born with a life-limiting condition.

In keeping with Hindu traditions, there were almost no monuments . . . those that existed were small and handmade.

There were monuments to four humans who had perished, but whose remains were not recovered, among them Shane Weldon and Vikram Nayar, lost in space along with the prototype X-38 vehicle. . . . Also the Revenant Camilla and Zack Stewart, both of them vaporized in Keanu’s core during the “restart.”

Several animals had emerged from the Beehive in the early days. There had been cows (cherished by the Bangalores, ultimately butchered by the Houstons, which almost caused a war inside the habitat), and birds, and even a crocodile.

And also a dog named Cowboy, a Revenant, a long-lost pet belonging to Shane Weldon.

Cowboy had lived almost eighteen years in his second life, dying of old age just after Yahvi and her cohort hit the dangerous age of eleven.

The dog was buried in a glade at the opposite end of the habitat from the human cemetery . . . much closer to the Beehive.

Oh, the Beehive—it was the one place in the habitat children were forbidden to enter.

So, naturally, it was the first place Yahvi and her friends went when they began to roam the habitat freely.

It was Nick Barton-Menon who suggested the wicked task of digging up Cowboy.

“God, why?” Yahvi said.

“He wants to see what he looks like,” Rook said.

“Use your imagination!” Yahvi said.

“Don’t be a turd,” Nick said, shoving Rook. “I know what it looks like. I want to try an experiment!”

“You’re not an engineer,” Yahvi said.

“No one’s an engineer for this,” Nick said.

“For what?”

“For doing what the Beehive is for,” Nick said, smiling like a very bad young man. “To bring things back to life.”

Yahvi wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea in practical terms. She knew it wasn’t a good idea in moral terms; her grandmother had become a Revenant. But only for a few tragic days.

“It was all the Architect’s doing,” Rachel had explained, the one time she discussed the matter with Yahvi. “We all think, now, that it was him, or Keanu, or both of them, trying to find a way to communicate with us.”

“Seems cruel.”

“I don’t think they planned for the Revenants to die. I think the whole system was barely functioning.”

Which, now that Yahvi thought about it, was a good reason not to go messing around with it.

She said as much to Nick.

Who had an answer, of course. “We aren’t trying to revive a human being,” he said. “Just a dog.”

So, to Yahvi’s disgust, the three of them, with the help of Ellen Walker-Shanti and Dulari Smith, used “borrowed” shovels and, after much difficulty, managed to uncover the shriveled, barely recognizable remains of Cowboy.

The sight was just sad, more soft bones than anything else. Some fur.

“Shane Weldon would kill us all if he saw this,” Yahvi said.

“Then let’s make sure he doesn’t,” Nick said.

Rook had been ordered to bring a tarp, equipment left over from the original HB recreational vehicle, half of which still occupied a place of honor not far from the Temple. “How the heck did you get this?” Yahvi asked. All of the original HB materials were treated like historical artifacts. Most were kept in a special exhibit inside the Temple.