We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “Holt talked, didn’t he,” Natalya bit back. She took a swig from her flask. “And look what happened to him.”

  * * *

  —

  Park came to Wick’s door just as her inlays gave the green-gold flash to indicate the time. Nine o’clock at night, by the ship’s clock. Lockdown hours. She stood outside of the bunk, feeling guilty, as if she was doing something illicit when everyone else was going to bed. Answering his call, sneaking to his room. Like a mistress—or a child about to receive a stern talking-to from a parent. What did he need to check up on her about?

  She knocked. The door slid open instantly, which meant Wick had been waiting to activate the room controls at the first sign of her arrival. When she came in, she saw that he was standing with his back to the door, his hands crossed squarely behind him. The pose seemed deliberate to Park, affected. For one thing, it prevented her from reading his face. For another, it suggested that Wick was unthreatened by her; that he had nothing to be concerned about, and so neither did she.

  Animals in the wild did that, Park thought. To lure their enemies into attacking. Then they whirled and made the kill themselves.

  “You wanted to see me,” she said, trying to banish her paranoia.

  “Yes,” Wick answered. He didn’t turn around immediately. “I thought we should take some time and—get on the same page. Since your position on the ship has changed.”

  “Because Keller’s frozen, and I’m now the primary psychologist?”

  “Yes.” Now he glanced back at her. “And because I can’t afford to have you out of the loop. Not with everything that’s been going on.”

  On the same page, Park found herself thinking, distracted. Out of the loop. Such strange, outdated terms. What page of what story were they struggling to get on? It felt like they were all parts of different volumes entirely. And did one want to be on the inside of a loop that was closing around the ship, like the knot of a tightening noose?

  “Everything that’s going on?” she echoed. She was too tired to berate herself for sounding like a simpleton.

  “I heard you and Fulbreech,” Wick said. He sounded almost apologetic. “Down in Deck C. While you were exploring the utility rooms.”

  Park blinked. “You were there?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Then—Natalya told you?”

  “No,” Wick said again, chagrined. “I mean—I heard you.”

  “I . . . don’t understand.”

  He sighed and turned, making a gesture at the wall; his wrist console activated and projected a holographic blueprint of the ship onto the blank gray panel. Park looked at the diagram uncomprehendingly. The only thing she could grasp was that there were flashing red dots in every single room.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Captain Sagara has activated the ARGUS protocol,” Wick said in turn. “Do you know what that is?”

  “No,” Park answered blankly. She shook her head. “Should I?”

  “I’m not sure,” Wick mused. “I don’t know how much information ISF gave you, as their—orbiter.”

  “Nothing about this.” Or anything of importance, she didn’t say.

  “The ARGUS protocol is a secondary function of METIS,” Wick said. “While METIS is largely devoted to maintaining the ship’s life support systems and its other prime directives, ARGUS is a way for us to . . . remotely monitor the crew’s activities on the ship.”

  Her mind flashed to what Jimex had said about cameras. “I thought there were only cameras in certain areas.”

  “That’s true,” he conceded. “In the labs and the bridge and the entryways, mostly. We keep the amount of cameras limited to conserve power, as well as to restrict filming only to the necessities. There are still legal entanglements about using people’s images, ever since”—he grimaced, as people often did when talking about privacy concerns—“Halla.”

  He was talking about the revolt, of course: the one that had sparked the Privacy Wars in the first place. It had started on an expedition ship headed to the planet that would later be founded as Haven. Conscripted crewmembers’ images were at that time the property of the ISF—it was in the contracts that they had signed, or their parents had signed, in exchange for passage to the colonies—and the ISF had used those images as part of a successful reality show that was streamed back to Halla. The profits from the show had in turn funded the expedition—but the expedition members themselves didn’t know they were being used as entertainment. And there were non-conscripted members who frequently wandered into the camera’s eye. On the crew’s return, there had been the expected moral outrage, legal battles. Then political conflicts. Then the Privacy Wars. It had taken a long time for the ISF to earn the public’s goodwill back after that one, Park knew. Perhaps they still hadn’t earned it. They wouldn’t risk it so lightly again.

  “So if there are only a few cameras on the ship,” she said, “what does ARGUS actually do?”

  “It’s a loophole,” Wick admitted. “An emergency measure. Although the ship doesn’t have many cameras, it is fitted with—” Here he hesitated. “Microscopic sensors. And auditory devices. Tools to collect and aggregate . . . data.”

  It took Park a moment to understand what he was saying. “You’re saying that the entire ship is bugged?” She looked again at the diagram, appalled. “Even the bathrooms? The sleeping quarters?” Even Wick’s own bunk had a flashing light!

  “It’s not what you think,” Wick said; now there was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, despite the ship’s customary cold. He’d known she wouldn’t be happy about this. “Normally ISF would have no interest in the minutiae of what goes on in the ship. ARGUS can only be activated under dire circumstances, by either me or Captain Sagara. And it’s not as if we’re actively listening to everything that’s going on, everything that everyone says. The amount of data would be overwhelming. And, again—it would be a violation.”

  He waved again, and the diagram vanished. “What we can do is let the ship’s computer collect, parse, and filter through everything the ARGUS sensors pick up, without having to review everything ourselves. The sensors throughout the ship record both sound and movement, down to a whisper or a specific twitch. They analyze body language without ever having to record images. Then we give the computer—METIS—patterns and keywords to recognize, let it sift through everything, and have it present us with the salient metadata. But without it—without the computer, I mean—the general ARGUS information means nothing to us. It’s just numbers, data. It anonymizes everyone for us. We can’t tie it to anyone’s identity, single anyone out. We only see the relevant slices if the system flags them and bundles them into a readable package for us: and that’s only if that data meets the criteria we implemented in the first place. You see? So we can’t access your conversations about—your families, or your favorite books, or what have you. The system only gives us that information if it thinks it fits what we’re looking for.” He took a breath, then continued before she could butt in. “That’s how Captain Sagara plans to find patterns in the behavior of the crewmembers if they become—affected. By whatever this affliction is, even if they don’t know it. It’s a measure meant to monitor, recognize, and prevent.”

  Park was horrified. “In what other circumstance would this protocol ever be necessary?” she demanded. “Why would such a program exist in the first place, unless ISF was already expecting something like this?”

  Wick looked sober. “I’m sure you’ve heard of mutinies happening,” he said quietly. “Crewmembers revolting, taking over ships. That’s what ARGUS is usually for. An ISF captain could activate it as a safety measure, if he suspected his crew of organizing against him.”

  That doesn’t justify the breach in privacy, was Park’s first thought. Then she remembered that a captain of an ISF ship had been murdered, a year before they’d launched the Deucalio
n. The crew had conspired to kill him and tried to steer the ship elsewhere. The ISF hadn’t said why. At the time she had guessed it was stress-related, the kind of contagious mania and mob mentality that sometimes took hold in isolated space—but now she wondered if they simply weren’t happy serving an entity that held their loved ones hostage. A government that used their own images and identities against them.

  No one could know for sure, anyway; all of the rebel crewmembers were now dead.

  Suddenly her thoughts flew back to that moment she had been talking to Jimex, down in Deck C before the encounter with Holt. The android had said there were cameras in certain parts of the ship, and also something else—before he suddenly cut himself off. He’d been trying to warn her about something. He’d said that Sagara had told him not to say.

  He must have noticed the bugs when he was cleaning rooms, Park thought. And Sagara silenced him. Ordered him not to tell me. Because he hopes to use ARGUS to catch me doing whatever he thinks I’m doing.

  “Who else knows about this?” she asked.

  “Sagara, obviously,” Wick said, oblivious to her thoughts. “Me. Boone. And now you.”

  “And why me?” She suddenly felt defensive, almost hostile. Wick said he had heard her and Fulbreech down in the utility rooms. Did that mean ARGUS had flagged their conversation as suspect? That he thought she was some sort of saboteur, as Sagara did?

  Wick put out a steadying hand toward her, though he didn’t go so far as to touch; Park still flinched away. “Because I think we need you,” he said gently. And when Park scanned his face, his slate-gray eyes, she saw that he was being sincere. That the skin around his eyes looked puffy, as if he’d been crying.

  “You think that?” she asked cautiously, still on her guard.

  Wick made a hapless gesture. “Look,” he said. “Kisaragi’s frozen. Keller and Holt and Ma are—sick. I don’t think now is the time to be divisive, to isolate and mistrust each other. And truth be told, I’m not convinced that—even if ARGUS could figure out what behaviors are red flags—it would do us a lot of good. Because we still wouldn’t understand what was causing it all. What the root of the problem was.” He looked into her eyes. “We would need you, Park. Your expertise and insight. We need you to understand what exactly is going on.”

  Park felt a crest of emotion rise within her, and couldn’t tell if it was hysteria or sentimentality. She couldn’t help but think again of what Natalya had said, earlier in the corridor: But do you understand the content of what you’re observing? What it all means?

  Wick had faith that she could. She wanted to feel touched, grateful. She thought she did. But she could only say, “What’s down in the utility rooms, Wick?”

  Her commander paused then. Worked his jaw for a moment; opened his mouth and then shut it again. Finally he said, looking tired: “We never kept things from you, Park, or anyone really, because of anything personal. You know that ISF determines who knows what based on who they think they can control. It’s a matter of conscription. They explicitly told us not to let you—the non-conscripted—know too much, in case of leaks. They don’t want the data getting out to the knowledge companies back home. Or even to the terrorists themselves.”

  “Yes,” was all Park could say. She told herself not to tremble.

  Wick spread his hands. He broadcasted helplessness, resignation, the idea that these things were out of his hands. “If it were up to me, everyone on the ship would have access to the same amount of information,” he said. Then he looked away. “But it’s not. Up to me, that is. So I have to ask that anything I tell you is kept private and between us. I’m violating my orders by bringing you into the fold. I discussed it with Sagara, and I think—I think he doesn’t mistrust you personally. In fact, I think he respects you, in his own strange way. But he’s an ISF man. By the book, follows his orders. Loyal to ISF to a fault. So he won’t be happy about me telling you. But I think it’s necessary. My call as commander.”

  “I understand,” Park said, trying to crank on a soothing smile. “I’ll obey the confidentiality strictures. Of course.”

  Wick took a breath.

  “We came to Eos for colony reconnaissance, it’s true,” he said. “But we also came for something else. Close to a year ago, ISF received a mayday transmission from a miner who’d gotten stranded here by accident. In viewing the videos he sent, we discovered something about the planet. There’s some sort of phenomenon that goes on here. A—gravitational anomaly.”

  Park waited. She expected herself to feel the lancing bolt of shock, maybe even outrage. Wick was telling her that they’d hidden half the damn mission from her. But somehow she felt nothing. It had been distantly obvious to her all along—like a billboard she could only dimly make out. Why else would they forbid her from seeing the planet? Why else would they confine non-essential personnel to the ship, if not because there was something unusual about Eos itself?

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “A gravitational anomaly?”

  “It’s not far from here,” Wick said. “A few kilometers. We’ve been calling it the Fold, for lack of a better word. It looks like fractal structures from a distance, or giant mirrors towering into the sky—but in fact, they’re not structures or surfaces at all. They’re creases in space. In dimensions.”

  Park stared at him. “I’m not following.”

  Wick shook his head. “I don’t have a strong grasp of it, myself. To put it simply, space and gravity behave strangely in that area—in the Fold. Holt had some theories about a concentration of dark matter or gravity wells forming, but I lost the thread of it fairly quickly—and now he’s frozen. But we’ve been trying to study the thing.”

  “What do you mean, space and gravity behave strangely?”

  Wick scratched the back of his neck. “It’s hard to explain it if you haven’t seen it yourself. Essentially, in the Fold, space curves back on itself. It’s as if something folds our four-dimensional space into shapes that intersect with a fifth dimension.”

  She gave him a blank stare.

  Wick sighed. “Here’s how Fulbreech explained it to me. Imagine you were a two-dimensional being—flat—living on a piece of paper. If something were to fold that piece of paper into, say, a three-dimensional triangle, a pyramid, the shape would be far too complex for you to comprehend. But only because you couldn’t see the true simplicity of the shape from a higher dimension. And then if something were to fold that piece of paper into an origami crane—”

  “My entire dimension would be turned topsy-turvy,” Park finished. “Instead of the surface I knew, the whole thing would be bent into something utterly incomprehensible. So this anomaly is like an origami crane?”

  “A fifth-dimensional origami crane, yes,” Wick affirmed. “There, space curves around a fifth dimension; gravity and light make a U-turn on themselves. Does that make sense?”

  “Not really, to be honest.”

  Wick kneaded the skin between his eyes. “I’m making a botched job of this,” he muttered. “Let me speak without theory, then, and tell you my experience with the Fold. From afar and at certain times of day, it looks obvious to the naked eye: it’s a mass of light and reflection, like shards of glass the size of skyscrapers. But as you get close to it, the whole thing seems to vanish, like a mirage—because you’ve entered the dimensional fold itself. And when you’re there, in the midst of it, you realize these fractal structures and shards aren’t solid surfaces, as they seem from a distance—they’re holes or creases in space itself, usually reflecting themselves back onto each other. The dimensions collapse together there, and then reform again into something different. For example, I put my hand through one crease and saw it emerge from another, fifty yards away. I was waving at myself. Very uncanny.”

  “And it—doesn’t harm humans? Being in this mass of dimensional folds?”

  “It doesn’t seem to,” Wick said. �
�But it is—disorienting, to say the least. Like being trapped in one of those paintings with the Escher stairs, the ones that twist in impossible ways. At one point Boone wandered off, said he thought he saw somebody running out in front of him. But he was following a reflection of himself—no, Holt said he was actually following himself. Space folded back on itself in such a way that he was going in an endless loop, chasing his own body, just ahead.”

  Park put a hand to her temple. “This is giving me a headache.”

  Wick smiled slightly. “I know the feeling. Long story short, dimensions are merged together and refolded into different shapes in the Fold. It’s something we’ve never seen before. And if we can understand it—master it—there’s no telling what it could mean. We could utilize it for instantaneous travel—collapsing the distance between two points—or communication. We could use it to terraform new planets. We might even be able to use it to shape space itself, refolding it as we like. Who knows? Maybe we could even restore Earth to what it was like before the Comeback.”

  That gave Park a start. She took a long moment to process it. Restore Earth? That was momentous. No wonder the ISF was so eager to keep it a secret, until they could study the anomaly further. She said, “Would it be possible for humans to live permanently in such a place?”

  Wick shook his head, rueful. “It’s too soon to say. The air here is partially breathable, and there’s an Earth-like atmosphere in terms of pressure. If your helmet sprang a leak, you wouldn’t die instantly—which is better than most planets. But we know almost nothing about the Fold. It seems contained to that single area now, but what if that changed? And we don’t know what’s causing the folds in the first place. Until we can understand that, we can’t know if it’s safe enough to settle here.”

  And let’s not forget the radiation storms, Park thought. Or the nightmares. “So what’s in the utility rooms? Equipment to study the Fold? A lab?”

  “Yes,” Wick said heavily. “Which is supposed to be classified, kept secret. Boone was stationed to guard it, when we didn’t know where Holt was; it’s why he was down there this morning, to prevent anyone from jeopardizing the data. He’s supposed to keep away non-ISF personnel.”