We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “So that means you’re Earth-born.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But not conscripted.”

  Park didn’t answer for a long time. They walked in silence for a while, letting something hang in the air between them, sloshing uneasily. Park kept her eyes away from the walls this time, though her brain beat so hotly with anger and embarrassment that she thought it might burn away any illusions she’d seen earlier. Finally she said, “I don’t understand.”

  Fulbreech tried to lengthen his stride to catch up to her, but Park only sped up in response. “Most of the people on this crew are colony-born, or conscripted,” he said, his voice a little strained from the effort to keep up. “They don’t put that in our files.”

  No, Park thought. They didn’t. She’d had to guess, or infer from what other people said when they thought she wasn’t listening. But she didn’t know where he was going with this line of thought, and pursed her lips against the idea that he was trying to distract her from what had just happened. But Fulbreech persisted: “On missions like this, ISF prefers to use people from the colony pools only. But there was such a rush that they had to bring people from Earth. People who aren’t conscripted. You see?”

  “No,” Park said flatly.

  Behind her, Fulbreech sighed. “ISF likes control,” he said, enunciating clearly, as if she were foreign, or slow. “There was a mission last year where a battleship was deployed to Halla to take out a terrorist base. The conscripted gunmen on board knew that. But the non-conscripted were told that they were going to Mars—just to prevent them from leaking it to the terrorists. Some of them were from Halla, and never knew they’d bombed it until they got home.”

  Park turned and stared at him. But before she could ask more, Fulbreech resumed walking again, making it clear that he wasn’t going to say more. Now it was Park’s turn to follow him; she dogged his footsteps in a daze. She needed sleep; she couldn’t quite process what he was telling her. Was he saying that the expedition members—the ones who were compelled into service to the ISF—were forced to hide the very nature of their mission itself? That the secrets ran deeper than the mysterious side projects, the details of Eos—that their very purpose for being there was presented differently to each side?

  But ISF hired me to monitor the situation, she thought. To report back on it. What point would there be to that if they wouldn’t let her know everything?

  Fulbreech’s hand bumped into hers. Park snatched her arm back as if she had been bitten; Fulbreech pretended not to notice. Overhead there was a plinking sound. It made Park think of the sound that had filled New Diego when hail clattered against the biodome.

  “Asteroid shower,” Fulbreech said to Park’s unspoken question, looking up. “It must be minor, or METIS would have activated the shields.”

  Park struggled to pull herself out of her own thoughts. “Are we safe?”

  “Oh, sure,” he answered. “We’re always safe on the Deucalion.”

  Park thought of Holt’s charred suit flaking off his body in drifts like gray snow. Fulbreech met her eye and grimaced, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Hopefully these are only temporary problems, Park,” he said. “Every expedition has its share, especially during the first wave.”

  The thought of other people settling here had not even entered her mind—she had almost forgotten they were here to determine if Eos was a suitable place to live. A place to build up and populate. “So you’re saying this is normal? All of this is to be expected?”

  Fulbreech looked away. They were nearing the airlock—the great set of double doors that led to the outside. “I’m saying we have to make the best of what we’ve got.”

  They slowed. Park stopped in front of the enormous vault. It was a complex archway with its own console terminal dedicated to opening each door, governing the quarantine procedures for the space in between. She imagined that she could feel a chill coming off the metal—that some trace of Eos was leaking through. She couldn’t remember clearly what the planet looked like, anymore. Would she ever be able to see the twin suns again—the strange Eotian ice? Or would they leave with her still ignorant, like the Hallanese crewmembers who’d attacked their own home without ever seeing it?

  She took a deep breath and said, “Have you found anything out there yet?”

  Fulbreech glanced at her, frowning. “You know I’m not supposed to talk to you about it.”

  Park felt so tired that she wanted to cry. “I know,” she said wearily. “But it’s not abnormal for me to wonder.”

  Fulbreech exhaled. “No,” he said, a concession. “It’s not abnormal at all. But . . .”

  Then he grimaced, as if she’d done something to hurt him; as if she’d slipped a knife between his ribs, and he could not believe her betrayal. She saw it in his face: he wanted to help her. Wanted to please her. Wanted her regard. But he was afraid of something. The consequences of disobeying his orders, his conscription, perhaps—though if he wasn’t being dramatic for her sake, she had to admit: it looked even more dire than that.

  Finally Fulbreech closed his eyes, as if trying to recall a distant memory. Then, in a low voice, he said, “The planet itself is beautiful. There’s a place I particularly like, not far from here. We call it the Glass Sea. There’s no snow, just ice—ice of all colors. The ground looks like one of those shards of green bottles you’d find in the ocean back home.”

  Park waited. Fulbreech continued, eyes still closed: “Out in the distance you can see the white horizon—we think it might be a salt plain—and then huge pillars of ice jutting up into the sky. Bigger than Everest; bigger than anything back on Earth. Some of the pillars are pink and purple, like rock candy. A lot of light blue, which turns to gray when the light goes down.”

  Park closed her eyes, too. She felt Fulbreech shift, as if to take her hand, and before he could she said, “What do you mean when you say ‘the planet itself’? What else is there?”

  Fulbreech paused. When Park opened her eyes, she saw that he had turned away from her, his shoulders rounded as if expecting an assault. “I don’t think,” he said, “that humans can live here, Park.”

  “So why are we still here?”

  Fulbreech looked at her, and for a moment he looked like a stranger, his face was so grave and changed. The light shifted, and it seemed to Park that the walls shrank inward, tensing up as if the room were holding its breath. All around them was the dim roar of the ship—the bombardment of ice and stone and the fragments of stars.

  “Fulbreech?” she repeated. “Why are we still here?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Fulbreech said miserably.

  And that, she finally believed.

  9.

  There was a short period in Park’s life where she had to choose whether or not to go to school. It was the year that the city finally decided to implement android teachers, laying off most of the human ones. In retaliation, the dismissed teachers and concerned parents held protests in front of the school, the teachers waving primitive hand-printed signs that embarrassed Park, the parents refusing to let their children go to class. Park’s uncle was away from the biodome at this time—“out in the field,” as he called it, and generally unreachable—and so Park had the choice of staying home and pretending he was one of these upset parents, or going to school as usual.

  She went to school. She had nothing better to do at home, other than watching Glenn do the chores, and no friends to play truant with around the dome. And besides, she approved of the switchover to android instructors: they were objectively better at teaching than humans were. They had the state-of-the-art educational programs; they never grew tired or overworked; they didn’t play favorites or throw books at gum-chewing mouth-offs. Plus, they made students too afraid to cheat: their eyes had the infrared sensors, the cameras. They could ruin your life if they wanted to, or if anyone got ahold of the footage in their heads�
��so their presence kept students on the straight and narrow. Delinquency decreased around the biodome. It was a general improvement for everybody—except the fired teachers.

  Park wanted to show her support for the change, so she kept going to class, Glenn in tow as always. In those days it was still considered childish for a girl of her age to walk to school with her android chaperone, to be picked up by him. Such a thing was for small children, who were bound to get lost or kidnapped by flesh-traders, but by now Park was tall and light-boned, and she was beginning to develop breasts. Still, she hardly cared what her classmates thought of her, their stares as she walked past them with Glenn carrying her schoolbag. She pretended not to notice their tiny smirks. Once, Glenn commented seriously, “It seems that you amuse your peers.”

  “I wouldn’t call it amusement,” Park said.

  “What would you call it, then?”

  “Ignorance,” Park replied. “Or the Freudian impulse to hate what’s different from you.”

  Glenn was silent at this. Usually he could keep up with her; Park didn’t know who had developed his positronic brain, but whoever it was had made Glenn so close to human that sometimes she didn’t recognize him in a crowd. If she wasn’t looking closely, the eyes that gazed calmly back at her could have been anyone’s. His body was both warmly familiar to her and as unremarkable as a stranger’s. He seemed to process things just as anyone did—or faster. She couldn’t remember if he’d always been like this, or if he was evolving.

  But he didn’t quite understand Freud. Not yet, anyway.

  Before the protests, Glenn would pass Park her bag and watch from the gate as she ascended the front steps to school. Sometimes he would stay at his post until class was over; other times he wandered off into the city to run errands or pick up supplies. At least, this was what Park assumed he did: Glenn was mostly self-directing. She didn’t leave him any lists. Things just got done.

  But once the picket line appeared, Park had to take steps to ensure that Glenn always quietly broke off from her, several yards from the school entrance. She didn’t think that any of the protesters were disgruntled enough to hurt Glenn—they might not even recognize him as an android, if they weren’t looking attentively—but she couldn’t take any chances. Every morning she read about seething crowds of rioters flooding the city, bearing down on innocent courier androids or the sexbots loitering on the corners. Every morning she saw image-grabs of how the demonstrators had unleashed their fury, tearing their victims apart, scattering their metal limbs to the streets. Wires dangling gruesomely, synthetic skin flapping like loose chicken flesh. They were sending a message, one man told the news. Telling the big robot companies that their products weren’t welcome in the city anymore. It was the only way they could get anyone to listen, to stop them from sending “the clunkers” in. The protesters didn’t want to do it—destroy the robots, that is—but it was their only choice. “Hit ’em where it hurts,” the man said to the cameras, smugly. “Their wallets.”

  “They’re idiots,” Park said whenever she watched these interviews. “Why hasn’t anyone arrested them? Destroying androids is illegal.”

  “As illegal as knocking over trash cans,” Glenn answered imperturbably. He was also scanning through the newsfeeds, though he downloaded them directly into his processing unit, while Park had to scroll through them on her wrist console. “Most of the perpetrators are issued fines to cover the property damage, but few seem to comply.”

  “They’re idiots,” Park said again.

  “They’re afraid,” said Glenn. “From my understanding, it’s different. But also, in some ways, the same.”

  No, she couldn’t risk anything happening to Glenn. He had orders from her to draw as little attention to himself as possible; when he could help it, he was to go straight home after dropping her off. If someone tried to hurt him, she gave him permission to enact self-defense protocols—but Glenn told her that if he had to harm a human in order to defend himself, his programming would render him catatonic. “Safety measures,” he said, to which Park answered, “I don’t care about their safety. What about yours?”

  Anxiety felt like a knifepoint in her forehead whenever he was away. Park viewed her own presence as a kind of protective charm for Glenn, a shield; no one was going to destroy another person’s android right in front of them. It was only when they caught the robots out alone that the mob got whipped into such a frenzy. Without their human to accompany them, it was easy to view the androids as nothing but machines: unfeeling, unconnected, unmoored. It was easy to hurt them. To the demonstrators, it was a “victimless” crime. Only wallets got hurt.

  But, Park thought—but if she could just stay by Glenn’s side as much as possible—she could protect him. They could see that he was important. They could see that she cared.

  “Be safe,” Park would say to Glenn as he handed over her schoolbag each morning.

  “I understand,” he would answer seriously. His classic response. “I understand” was a default programmed phrase, Glenn’s most basic factory setting—practically an instinct, like a baby smiling when you smiled at it, or a dog wagging its tail when you called its name. Essentially an empty verbal cue that indicated that her words had registered, but he had nothing better to say. How much did he really comprehend, rather than simply hear? How much of it was just a ritual, an acknowledgement without deeper knowledge: shadow puppets making gestures at each other from across the wall, but never quite connecting without losing their shapes altogether? Sometimes she said it back to him: “I understand,” and then Glenn said that he understood that she understood, and then Park said that she understood that he understood that she understood, and it became a little game between them, the words stacking up on top of each other like a tower of cards. They formed an echo chamber with each other, their understanding circling overhead, invisibly.

  But sometimes he said it and she was afraid that it didn’t mean anything.

  But then there were the other times—the times that he would smile at her, faintly, when she told him to be safe. Once or twice Glenn squeezed the tops of Park’s fingers, hard, imparting some hidden meaning that she didn’t try to decode. Then he would turn on his heel and leave. So maybe “I understand” really meant “Goodbye.” Who could know? All she knew was that if she kept giving the command, he kept coming back again, whole. As long as she told Glenn to be safe, he would be. He had to follow orders.

  After Glenn broke off each morning, Park would head into the school building by herself. It was easier than she expected to walk past her former teachers every day, neither avoiding nor seeking eye contact. Mostly the protesters seemed to ignore her, angling their bodies a little away from her as she crossed the picket line; it almost seemed like a silent agreement among them that they had expected her to come to class, that she should be treated as an exception. Park didn’t know if she felt relieved or unsettled—only knew that the adults avoided acknowledging her, looking down the street as if in a sudden reverie, and their shouts and chants died down until she was inside. It was like a busy stream of traffic slowing to let a wolfox cross the road, only to hit full throttle again as soon as the animal left the asphalt. Was it because everyone universally respected wolfoxes—or was it because roadkill was simply too messy to deal with?

  The only other student who showed up for school during the protests was a small, dark-haired, thin-shouldered boy named Dataran Zinh. The name told Park that his parents were probably from Mars. He certainly acted like it: he startled easily at loud noises, he didn’t seem to understand basic Earth procedures. He had no friends, like Park, which explained why he bothered coming to class. Their new teacher, “Ms. Allison,” didn’t seem to register that 99% of its students were missing, and went on with the day’s lesson as usual. Its gray, unthinking eyes swept the room as it lectured, just as if the seats were still full. Park wondered if it was just putting up a front, to maintain status quo, or
if someone had programmed it to simply accept the new class size as the norm.

  Most of their education was comprised of science, math—and some pre-Comeback history, which trickled in piecemeal. Even when she was young, Park got the feeling that whatever history they were taught about that era was heavily edited: any mention of the Comeback, with its two phases of natural purging disasters and unstoppable plant growth, was paired heavily with descriptions of how the ISF had saved them all, how foresighted it’d been to build the first colonies in space. The infrastructures of the previous centuries had not been equipped to deal with a catastrophe like the Comeback. Countries were wiped off the map, their borders eradicated by the plants. When the roads were overtaken, or the weather phenomena had devastated too many population centers, the previous governments had simply . . . collapsed. Like a chair buckling under too much weight. Legs breaking off in showers of sawdust. The workers, the firemen, the emergency services all went to hell—and then the whole planet had been swallowed. How could anyone have fought it? People could stave off predators, human enemies, even machines—but not the planet itself. In the end it was better to chalk the whole thing up to a loss, move to some newer, untainted planet, and start over, away from the insidious encroachment of the Earth’s assault. Do as the ISF did, and thrive in a vacuum where human life didn’t have to compete with plants.

  Thank God for the Interstellar Frontier, Park echoed, a little bitterly. Amen.

  Other than the proselytizing, not much else was said about life before or during the great catastrophe. Better not to dwell in the past, Park figured. Better not to plant seeds of longing, or nostalgia—it would only do good to look forward, not back. Pains were taken to avoid embittering people about their present circumstances. The curious, then, were forced to scrape bits and pieces of history together from old filmstreams, from rumors passed around on media platforms by so-and-so’s great-grandfather about a time when everyone could drive cars and there were things called “parks” around: great open squares of grass where people did cartwheels and had picnics and lay around in the sun. Park found this last tidbit funny—that a park had once been something that was open and exposed.