In any case, Zack searched for a handle and saw none. (Given the size of the thing, a handle would likely be out of his reach, anyway.)

So he began pressing on various parts of the door. He even tried to probe the obvious edges.

Nothing. He shouted “Hello!” and “Hey, I’m here!” and “Please open up!”

Still nothing. The door stayed locked.

He looked at Taj’s Zeiss radio/camera. In frustration, he aimed it at the marker, adding, “This is Zack Stewart, for Bangalore or Houston, transmitting blind.” And deaf, he wanted to add.

“If you hear me, you can likely see this . . . it’s what we’re calling the Temple of the Architects. My wife and one other revived person have been brought here. I’m searching for access. Unless I’m missing something very important, I’m locked out.”

He counted to ten, heard nothing. Then, just to be sure, he counted to ten again. He added a third ten.

Still nothing. And his frustration finally reached a boil. He picked up the Zeiss, fully prepared to test its alternate use as a hammer. How long would it last when he slammed it against the marker—?

“Zack, this is Houston, Jasmine Trieu back at you. Do you copy?”

“Houston . . . Zack Stewart here. It’s great to hear your voice, Jasmine!”

The lag might be only seven or eight seconds, but it felt much longer. Then he heard: “We’ve got a lot to catch up on, Zack. Can you talk?”

Zack looked up at the impervious Temple door. “Houston, I’ve got nothing but time.”

This interview is over.

MOST FREQUENTLY USED PHRASE BY MEGAN STEWART INTERVIEW SUBJECTS

Megan Doyle Stewart was not at all sure she approved of her newly reborn state. Yes, she’d been given a second chance at life, but why? What for? She had gone almost directly from car crash in Florida to the Beehive on Keanu.

Yes, something of “Megan Stewart” had existed for those two years in between . . . bodiless, blind, deaf, a state that would have terrified the living Megan, taking her buried-alive fear to a horrific extreme.

Yet she hadn’t felt fear. Instead she had . . . well, soared, flown, skipped from memory to memory. She had become unstuck in time and space, recalling and reliving her first kiss with Sean Peerali and meeting Zack at that party in Berkeley and late nights editing and dragging her tricycle across Main Street. . . .

But whereas dreams were mixed-up, twisted replays of a day’s activities, these moments seemed real, a record of what she had seen and heard and felt at the time.

She had even experienced “memories” from different points of view . . . other people in those same scenes. And in at least one instance—that she could recall now; it might have been a dozen or a hundred—she lived a moment from some other person’s life altogether.

The more she thought about it, the more fascinating it was . . . right up to the inevitable instant when she realized that unless her luck changed radically, and soon, she was going to be right back in that . . . postlife environment, a matrix of memories, a file in some cloud computing system.

In any case, since reawakening, she had not had much time to dwell on the larger eschatological issues, being more concerned with adjusting to the environment, with functioning as an organic being again . . . and with the pain and joy of reconnection with Zack and Rachel.

Who were now, apparently, lost to her again.

No one had told her about the detonation atop Vesuvius Vent. She had actually felt it, as a noise combined with a flash combined with a sickening tremor.

Thankfully, it had lasted only a second or two. All of her senses had actually shut down, like filters on a camera turned to the Sun.

Still, it felt as though she had been thrown off the top of a building, only to be grabbed the instant she cleared the ledge, but not before seeing the twenty-story fall that awaited her.

She had been able to tell Zack that she knew, that the event was bad news. Or was it bad? It was . . . important. That was what the message from the Architects said.

It was like one of her early news reports, before marrying Zack, covering the collapse of a good chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf.

In some ways, it was bad . . . it was expected to raise global ocean levels by several feet, enough to ruin some coastal cities . . . but not instantly, not so quickly that people couldn’t move out of harm’s way.

And given that she was far inland in Colorado at the time, not of immediate concern to her.

Still . . . it was a Significant Event.

As soon as she had told Zack, however, something had happened to her . . . she had felt herself growing extremely fatigued, almost faint.

She knew that one of the Sentries had grabbed her; she had seen the creature approaching in her peripheral vision but had been powerless to run, scream, or do anything, in fact, but shut down.

(Which made her wonder just what other “improvements” the Architects had made in her resurrected body.)

She awoke in a heap inside the Temple—and alone. Camilla wasn’t with her.

She was in a large room that was so big, shadowy, and empty that it gave her the creeps. It was like being in a monster’s cave. The Evil Ogre’s castle.

With no door or windows.

The floor looked like wood in that it had a grain or cellulose-style pattern. But it was too hard to be wood. There was a trail of some kind that led from Megan’s resting place toward a wall, some kind of nasty spooge that had the apparent texture of a snail trail. Megan had not been able to force herself to touch it.

The ceiling was out of reach; it looked to be the same material, minus the patterning, but with squiggly shapes that let in light.

The walls looked like the exterior of the Temple, varicolored and oddly shaped bricks that, when touched, seemed about to crumble . . . but didn’t. Megan could compare it to something from Zack’s world: the thermal-protection tiles of the old space shuttle. Those silicate cubes were incredibly light and felt like plastic foam . . . yet were such perfect insulators that you could bake one to a thousand degrees in an oven, then pick it up with your bare fingers.

Maybe the Temple needed to be insulated. Megan remembered being jogged several times during her “ride,” prior to being rolled onto this floor. And although the floor felt solid—like the sort of marble you found in Houston mansions—Megan’s bare feet detected a low-frequency vibration, like the drone of a power line.

The room wasn’t empty, either. It was stuffed with furniture. It would have been too much to ask, she guessed, for anything as simple as a table or chair. There were solid, symmetrical platforms at varying heights, but none lower than her eye level. Other objects were spherical, cylindrical, or, to use a word Rachel had loved, blobular.

Some were solid colors, though none Megan would have allowed in her home. Others had stripes or patterns. The surface of one particular cubelike object was different every time Megan looked at it.

And several of the objects transmitted the same hum that could be felt in the floor. It reminded Megan of mission control, with all its computers and screens . . . but it looked like a catalog photo for home decorators from Mars.

Oh yeah, there were no sanitary facilities . . . and of more immediate concern, no food or water.

She wondered about Camilla. She knew the girl had been taken . . . even if she was in an apparently benign environment like this, she must be terrified.

Thinking of Camilla reminded Megan of Rachel, and Zack. And the utter futility of her circumstances. She had heard the phrase better off dead most of her life . . . for the first time, she believed there might be something to it.

She leaned against one of the flat-surfaced objects and slid to the floor. Barefoot, largely naked, except for the surprisingly durable underlayer of the second skin, she could literally feel the vibrations of the wind against the Temple walls.