We are following your journey into deeper space with hope and love and prayers for your safety.

We think of you every day, every moment…praising God for allowing you a second chance at life, and trying to understand his purpose in giving you that chance on Keanu.

BROADCAST FROM KOROLEV MISSION CONTROL TO KEANU BY LUCAS MUNARETTO

SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

My favorite video game was Satan War, where you got to shoot your way out of the deepest part of hell while crossing rivers of fire and oceans of shit and fields of spikes.

All the while being chased by demons and hoping you could get to heaven.

So far my life in Keanu has been a lot like Satan War, only WITHOUT THE POWER UPGRADES AND WEAPONS AND THE GOAL OF HEAVEN.

KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, ENTRY #4

THE PRISONER

Struck by the long-finned creature, the Prisoner did not lose consciousness, but it was stunned, almost paralyzed.

The strange creature continued to approach, perhaps to conduct an examination. Which worked to the Prisoner’s advantage; it would conduct its own examination of its assailant.

The Prisoner realized its assailant was smaller and, most unusually, not wearing any kind of garment to protect it against open space. When the assailant spread itself, it revealed many fins—arms, nonaquatic beings called them.

For a moment, the Prisoner thought it one of the broken vessel’s crew.

But now the Prisoner recognized this creature. It didn’t belong here any more than the Prisoner did. The Prisoner knew, of course, that its people were not the only residents of the warship. There were others, some of them quite dangerous. The Prisoner had never met any of these others, of course, dangerous or not. But it had been warned since youth about one in particular:

This type, a Tall Fins.

The Prisoner was never quite sure what was so fearsome about the Tall Fins. They were relatively small, for one thing. They did not appear to possess the traits of an intelligent race—no clothing, no tools, no transport vessels.

No communications. There was no chance the two could strike a truce. So went the stories. Yet apparently wherever the Tall Fins went, other creatures died.

However, this was not the Tall Fins’s environment. It was forced to scramble along the sharply angled walls of the interior, which took time and allowed the Prisoner to recover and pry a metal rod from the vessel’s interior—

A quick swipe of the rod sent the Tall Fins flying into a wall.

The Tall Fins seemed momentarily stunned. Brandishing the metal rod, the Prisoner maneuvered blindly toward the vessel’s hatchway, knowing an exit was going to be difficult because of the small dimensions of the opening.

The Prisoner considered the next move. The Tall Fins did not appear to be strong enough to engage in a duel of metal rods. But what other weapons did it have? Poisons? The warship’s builders had stocked the resident environment with a menace long extinct on the home world: a round floating creature that defended itself with a shower of needles—

Shifting within its protective suit of skin, the Prisoner brandished the rod. The Tall Fins reacted, retreating. In the combat games of youth, the Prisoner had learned to feint with the major arm, then shift the weapon to a lesser arm for the killing blow.

But the wound in its back! Much worse than the Prisoner had believed. It felt pinned, almost helpless. The only option was to wait for the Tall Fins to come close enough to strike—

To the Prisoner’s surprise, however, the Tall Fins skittered away, toward the opening, then out. For a moment, the Prisoner feared that the creature meant to seal the opening, locking it in.

But fractions of a cycle passed…and the opening remained clear.

The Prisoner knew that the garment would eventually seal itself around the wound, but the shard…the Prisoner bent forward—some pain, though bearable.

But no freedom. Every place it went, it seemed, the Prisoner was fated to be constrained.

The only option was to rock from side to side, resulting in substantially more pain, and the fear that the garment’s seal would tear.

With a crack the Prisoner could feel in its dorsal side, the shard separated.

Freedom! The garment remained sealed…but the shard remained.

The pain was comparable to dividing…only it promised to last far, far longer.

And might kill the Prisoner before it could return to the relative safety of its cell.

In agony, the Prisoner began the slow, unpleasant process of squeezing through the opening.

A long, painful walk lay ahead.

ZHAO

“This is really starting to freak me out,” Rachel announced.

She and Pav and Zhao had walked, by Zhao’s estimate, half a kilometer down the lightless shaft. Discovering that the Indian boy carried a Slate, Zhao invented a game: Every two hundred paces, which had to be counted by Rachel, then Pav in turn, the trio would stop and flash the Slate’s light.

They had accomplished five such illuminations, none of which revealed anything different, just a smooth, rocky floor and walls that curved enough to confirm that they were in a cylinder.

Zhao was growing a bit unsettled himself, given the bizarre circumstances…being essentially walled into the tunnel by a nine-year-old girl…theoretically chasing a dog—a reborn dog, let’s not forget—with limited resources, to wit: a Slate, a bottle of water, and a candy bar he had bartered from Xavier Toutant.

All in the company of the only two teenagers in the population, both of them children of the Destiny or Brahma astronauts.

Looking at it from Pav’s point of view, or Rachel’s, the situation was even more unsettling, given that they knew him as either a spy or a killer.

Rachel said, “Shouldn’t we be finding a cross-tunnel or some other way out by now?”

“In a human-built mine on Earth, yes,” Zhao said. “But I don’t think we can expect anything here.”

“Well,” Pav said, “Keanu is what, a hundred kilometers across? If we’re walking in a straight line, eventually we’ll get to the other side.”

Zhao forced a smile, even though he knew the teens couldn’t see it. Stay in character, he thought. Follow your training. He didn’t feel the need to point out that while this shaft seemed straight, it likely wasn’t…that it would not be a vector through the sphere that was Keanu, but could just as easily be an arc, curving and curving….

Well, that was a pointless mental exercise. Even if Pav were correct that following this shaft might lead to the other side of Keanu…they couldn’t walk a hundred kilometers without food and water.

They couldn’t walk twenty.

“My hunch,” he said, offering fake optimism, the kind you gave a prisoner undergoing interrogation, “is that we will find a branch or a turn or an exit once we’ve reached the end of our habitat.”

“Shouldn’t we be pretty close to that by now?” Pav said. He was a young man—inked, wired, impatient. Zhao knew quite a few like Pav, not just from his time in India, but in posts in China, too. He found them all difficult to control past a few hours.

Not that he was expecting to have to control Pav past a few hours. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “Pav, your turn to count.”

Both teens started walking again.

Rachel was a greater challenge than Pav. Zhao knew what buttons to push to keep a bright, immature teen male in line. He knew of no equivalent training buttons that would produce predictable results with a bright, immature teen female, especially an entitled American.

Especially an entitled American teen female whose father was in her life and affecting her behavior.