Keeper Seven: A First Contact Novella

>Iris Kael has taken the quietest job a person can take. One keeper, one year, one room. Listen, log anomalies, forward anything interesting. In twelve years of operation this station has forwarded nothing. On her forty-fourth day, something answers. It does not speak. It does not appear. It raises a bar on a cold-store door when she asks out loud, it lowers it again when she is through, and it corrects the pointing of ninety antennas a day after she notices they are wrong. Every instrument she owns says the same thing, and every instrument she owns is telling the truth. Behind that door are two hundred and forty filing cabinets on a station that has had seven keepers. Seven of them are lit. *Keeper Seven* is a first contact story told entirely in maintenance logs, plant readings and an eighteen-minute radio delay. There is no creature. There is no explanation. There is a woman who counts things, a dead woman's voice in the archive who is funnier than anyone alive, and a filing system that has been perfectly, patiently honest from the first page. **For readers of *Roadside Picnic*, *Annihilation* and *Blindsight* - the cold procedural kind, not the monster kind.** --- *The Answering Dark, Book One. Complete in itself.*