Donald Keene, a former congressman and silo designer, now uses Thurman’s authority to investigate the system and offer covert help to Lukas.
Donald entered Congress in 2049 with architectural training and the support of Paul Thurman, whom he had known since childhood. Recruited into the facility project, he worked alongside his former partner Anna Thurman while trying to preserve his marriage to Helen. Secrecy kept him from seeing the complete plan; excess construction supplies and duplicate facilities troubled him, while medication suppressed his anxiety. At the convention, Helen was at the Tennessee delegation after his messages failed to reach her. Donald tried to reach her when the blasts began but was forced underground. After long periods of freezing, he recovered memories of serving under the name Troy, which he had chosen as a clue leading back to Helen. He remembered terminating Silo Twelve and condemned the destruction his own designs had helped enable. Records showed that Helen and Mick Webb had built a family together. Searching for answers, Donald investigated Victor’s notes and the unrest in silo eighteen, favoring a reset over extermination. He later escaped to the surface hoping to die near Helen’s burial place, but was dragged back and frozen again.
On his next awakening, staff mistook Donald for Thurman. He maintained that identity, investigated the missing cleaner, and used the resulting authority to seek the project’s hidden purpose. After recovering his old belongings, he suspected Anna had engineered his separation from Helen. He woke her, confronted her, and gave her a drink containing sleeping pills, holding her as she died. Only afterward did he conclude that the silo rankings would select a single surviving silo and that Anna had been trying to warn him. Regretting the loss of someone he now regarded as an ally, he secretly woke his sister Charlotte to help investigate the outside. Donald hoped an unarmed drone could travel farther and told her he had seen blue skies and green grass before a drone went down; he suspected that invisible destroyers could be activated by a cleaner’s position or altitude. He then woke and restrained Thurman, demanded an explanation for generations of suffering, and shot him when Thurman reached for his pistol. Donald resolved to continue working secretly with Charlotte.
Donald has been coughing blood while pursuing these investigations. He conducted Lukas’s initiation through a masked communications link, confirming that their own side caused the catastrophe and insisting that protecting a silo could require cruelty. More recently he privately warned the new mayor, Juliette, to be careful where she dug, claimed he had saved her silo before, and said he could shut it down. In his latest conversation with Lukas, he urges further investigation of the data. He interprets an account of a fungus that alters brains as evidence that none of them are free, offers to divert attention from trouble, and says machines alter his voice.
Donald originally had thinning hair and the beginnings of a gut in his mid-thirties. Prolonged freezing has aged and weakened him; his latest described look includes scraggly hair and the beginnings of a beard.
A designer of the silos now exercising authority under Thurman’s identity in Silo One. He investigates the founders’ plan with Charlotte while maintaining contact with silo eighteen.
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