I just wish someone would tell us WHY we’re here and WHAT THE FUCK WE’RE SUPPOSED TO DO.

And WHEN WE GET TO GO HOME.

This officially sucks.

I’m scared. I hate typing those words, but it’s true.

I’ve never been more scared in my life.

KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, ENTRY #2

THE PRISONER

The only way the Prisoner was able to maintain any mental stability was through routine. It would wake, it would eliminate, it would exercise, it would eat. It would then perform an examination of its prison, carefully pacing the x and y axes.

An objective observer would have called it foolish, because obviously the measurements didn’t change.

Except once, exactly seven sleeps back. During that waking period, the Prisoner had discovered that its chamber had grown wider and shorter, as if reshaped. In search of confirmation, it had measured the area seven times—and, allowing for slight variations due to the imprecise nature of his instruments—confirmed that the prison had indeed been reshaped.

It was the same sleep period in which the Prisoner had felt numerous anomalous vibrations in the wall and floor. Obviously there was a connection, but what?

On the next sleep, it performed the measurements again, and found to its disappointment that the chamber had returned to its previous dimensions.

There were no strange vibrations during that sleep period, either.

In one sense, the Prisoner was happy; it had concocted a dire scenario in which every successive waking period would show that the chamber was growing fatter and shorter by the same amount each day…until it found itself pinned like vegetative matter.

It had been quite easy to speculate, during the darker moments of that calculation, that this was how its Keepers would punish it…exile having been judged insufficient, they would simply, slowly, crush the Prisoner.

The threat vanished with the return to normal measurements, and left the Prisoner feeling even more despairing.

Because it could live for years, decades, in this chamber.

The second stop on the Prisoner’s waking routine—and the last before swim and sleep—was the special place on the outer edge of the chamber…it was where the builders had embedded tiny assemblers to apply heat, light and information to the raw materials of the habitat in order to synthesize food, skin, or other materials.

It was also where it expended its own waste.

The Prisoner had located certain tools. They had been woven into the fabric of its prison by Powers-Beyond-the-Keepers. The Keepers themselves would be greatly angered to know that their Prisoner was using them.

One tool allowed the Prisoner to leave the prison, for brief periods.

There was no access to the larger Keeper environment, of course, but there was a means of going another direction.

Out, to the bleak surface of the vessel.

Of course, this required protection and support, but the Powers-Beyond-the-Keepers had prepared for this, equipping each environment with adaptives, self-shaping garments that would provide protection for one cycle.

Donning one of the adaptives was a rigorous challenge, though not much more rigorous than challenges the Prisoner had faced and overcome while growing up in its birth habitat. Indeed, diving into the adaptive fluid had much in common with a rite that all had to endure before being allowed to divide: the triple, involving exposure to surface and air as well as sea. It was not meant to be fatal to participants, though it often was.

Donning an adaptive suit was not meant to be fatal, either.

Since this was the Prisoner’s fourth time donning the adaptive garment, the feelings of suffocation and loss of sight and hearing were almost familiar.

Once enclosed in the adaptive garment, out on the surface, the Prisoner had one cycle to find a weapon, a tool, anything to improve its existence.

ZACK

“I think this is going to be a giant waste of time.”

It had been two days since the vesicles had arrived on Keanu, one day after Megan’s burial, and Zack Stewart faced a wall, where Makali Pillay’s pronouncement was as obvious as it was discouraging.

“Hold on, for Christ’s sake,” he said, his voice ragged and harsh. “We just got here. We already know that these walls come and go.”

“I’d be happy to see you make it go,” Makali said. He had to fight the urge to turn on her and scream. Some microscopic vestige of his training and sense of command allowed him to absorb her sarcasm, charging it off to (a) the exhaustion and (b) the foreign accent.

Besides, Makali hadn’t already devoted an hour of her life to searching for a “missing” passage, as Zack had yesterday. He turned to his team, which, in addition to Makali, included Wade Williams, Dale Scott, and Valya Makarova. “Why don’t we all spread out and see what we can find.”

He immediately began probing the surface of the habitat with his fingers, which were scraped and filthy. He would have happily delayed a trip back to Earth for a ten-minute dip in Lake Ganges.

His last fatherly function had been to persuade Rachel to take her bath this morning. Harley Drake had set up a rotation for bathing—women one day, men the next. Logical, doable, for the moment. But Rachel’s participation? Not easy. “Daddy, it’s so gross!”

“It’s what we have.”

“But we’re drinking from it! We’re drinking from the same water all these…people are using!”

“Upstream.”

“What stream, Daddy? This is a…scummy pond.” He couldn’t argue on facts; his only appeal was, “You’re setting a bad example.”

That was the magic phrase, giving him victory, but at a cost. Rachel had begun stripping off her clothes, forcing him to turn away. His only real choice at that moment was to depart, heading back to where the new deputy mayor was trying to lead.

There he had run into Makali, Williams, Valya, and Dale Scott, several of the people he least wanted to see. Williams was busy sharing his extensive knowledge of life with Harley Drake, who wore an expression that proclaimed his disgust and indifference.

Makali Pillay was busy expressing herself in similar terms to Vikram Nayar, at least if body language was an indicator. She was half a head taller than the Bangalore flight leader…and far more animated.

“Zack! Over here!” Harley had shouted, clearly searching for any way to shut Williams up. “When do you head off to see the Wizard?”

“Now. What about you?”

“First priority, checking on Gabe. He’s not looking too good.” Zack could see the new mayor leaning tiredly on the wall of the Temple, nodding as half a dozen people tried to tell him things at the same time.

“And the rest of us are?”

“There’s dirty and hungry and tired, and there’s sick. Morning, Wade!”

Zack realized that Wade Williams, the sci-fi writer who had somehow managed to be included in Harley’s alien Home Team, had joined them.

On first meeting the man, Zack had looked at Williams’s outfit, a safari jacket and rumpled khakis, topped with a floppy jungle hat, and judged it pretentious and ridiculous. Now he was less sure. Of course, living in a filthy space suit undergarment for a week had lowered his standards for male attire. He would gladly have swapped his long johns for anything from a Victorian frock to a spandex superhero costume. “I’ve been trying to persuade your friend here to let me accompany you on your exploration this morning.”

That had alarmed Zack. What he’d had in mind was a quick loop past the tunnels where the Houston and Bangalore groups had emerged from the vesicle “dock.” Makali was a good companion for the mission; anyone else would just be baggage.

“And I,” Harley said, smirking in triumph, “think that would be an excellent idea.”