Heaven's Fall (17 page)

He spent at least a year mastering the system to where he could have won a contest with Jaidev. By the end of that time he was able to produce his own food. He even created a “garden” in an open space near his living quarters.

Such things already existed in the Factory, though none of them seemed to have been occupied for an extremely long time. (Even in the carefully controlled and engineered environments within Keanu, especially the Factory, dust accumulated. In a few structures, Dale saw signs of dead Reivers, powdery residue that ranged from film to heaping mounds, likely what was left of the smallest to the larger, anteater-like Aggregates, all killed in the plague the HBs had engineered and launched.)

Not one of the structures was truly optimized for human habitation. The Architect Dale had met was literally twice as tall as he was, and some buildings seemed suited for a being like that. Others had three floors where a human building would have one, suggesting that their inhabitants were really short, or very flat.

Dale’s ultimate “home” was an open area under the overhang of a building entrance. Given its nature, the Factory had no regular rain or fog . . . until the day it did, which came as a surprise.

It had happened only once or twice a year, but there was no predictability that Dale could see—no correlation between the sudden rains and occasional failure of the ceiling glowworms. (The first time Dale found himself in absolute total darkness, he had foolishly tried to run—slamming into a wall and breaking his nose.)

Fortified by his own solid if uninspired menu, Dale spent another two years using the Factory systems to learn about Keanu . . . where its power came from, how it propelled itself, how the transit system operated (or in this case, didn’t), how Keanu was able to create different gravity fields in the habitats . . . how it turned energy into the nanotech goo known as Substance K.

How it created the “vesicles,” the spherical space balloons that managed to launch off Keanu and land on Earth—then return with samples and humans. (Or launch off Keanu carrying a few hundred thousand Reivers . . . and never return.)

He never learned more than a fraction of what he wanted to know. No human could—and certainly no human rummaging through the system without a guide or a key.

One thing did strike Dale, however: Some of Keanu’s systems were off-nominal, either failed (the transit system) or failing (the weird reboots in the environmental support). That was certainly troubling . . . not that he could do anything about it.

Yet.

Eventually Dale tired of these explorations and decided to concentrate on experiments. More precisely, on making direct contact with Keanu itself.

The idea of Keanu being an individual wasn’t his—Zack Stewart suggested as much during that first week, after his own encounters with the Architect . . . whom Zack considered the voice of Keanu itself.

It was only contemplating the still-murky link between the Architect and the human Revenants that led Dale to agree with Zack’s conclusion. An entity the size of a small planet, with God only knew what sense of time passing, with a life span of ten thousand years, would naturally require some kind of avatar in order to communicate with tinier beings whose lives were limited to one hundred years.

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.

He saw Makali Pillay—aged a decade, but still recognizably herself—wearing a bizarre costume of some kind as she floated in a habitat with several Skyphoi!

Even in his dreamlike state, he could chortle with smug satisfaction:
You dumb bastards, you told me bullshit about Makali, so she stayed in my mind.

Makali led, in one of those odd little connections, to Zhao. Where had
he
gone?

He was elsewhere in Keanu, too . . . in a chamber Dale did not immediately recognize, but clearly working on something important and urgent.

Makali and Zhao—what was it?

He wanted to find them, go where they were.

He wanted out of this jail—

He opened his eyes now and saw that he was staring up at the “night” sky of the human habitat. The roof and walls of the hut had vanished as if they’d never existed.

Before he could sit up, a drop of rain hit him in the mouth.

It was followed by more rain.

He actually swallowed some water before feeling strong enough to get up.

When he did, grabbing his shabby clothes, all he thought was that a bit of rain might mean he was leaving tracks as he removed himself from the habitat.

No worry. Harley and the others, once they realized that their jail had disappeared and that they were no longer dealing with plain old Dale Scott, wouldn’t dare follow him.

Day Two

SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2040

QUESTION:
What was there about life on Earth that you missed most?

PAV:
Very little.

QUESTION:
Seriously?

PAV:
Look, throughout human history, most people lived their lives within a thirty-kilometer radius. Our habitat was pretty close to that.

QUESTION:
That might have been true prior to the nineteenth century, but you were born in 2003. You grew up with travel and cities and commerce—