We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Park, however, was immune. Despite the thefts, despite the stares and scoffs, she carried out her duties briskly, even cheerfully. She was happier than she had been in a long time.

  Like Keller, she was responsible for making rounds throughout the biodome, documenting the behaviors of the trainees, making herself available to hear out their anxieties and concerns. Most came to her reticently, feigning perfect composure to distinguish themselves as ideal candidates. The ISF predicted that half of them would be sent home before training was over.

  Others were more honest. Park had taken part in the initial interviewing process for each candidate. She had doled out the 556-question psychological tests, compiled profiles from the answers, scaled each candidate according to labile-stabile indexes, assigned numbers to their sociability, impulsiveness, changeability. She’d studied their receptiveness to devices like the MAD. Recorded their cortical arousal, the blooms of light that happened in their brains. And yet none of it had quite prepared her for the complexes that unveiled themselves in Antarctica. There was Peter Rochoff, an agriculturalist, who suffered bouts of insecurity that he tried to smother with over-robust laughter, as if everything Park said was a mean joke that he was confident enough to find the humor in. Lucia Van was one of the most efficient flight engineers Park had ever seen, and yet she was so avoidant of authority figures that Park eventually had to send her home. The biodome designer Wan Xu was a narcissist, something he had somehow kept hidden from the tests: he was constantly exasperated by the inferiority of the minds around him, constantly making himself out to be both the hero and the victim of any given situation. It was too bad he was also one of the most brilliant minds on Earth, at least when it came to building extraterrestrial habitats. Park always left their sessions with her eyes watering, as if she had narrowly escaped an accident—the sideswipe of an angry driver.

  And then there was Bebe Hill. Initially Park found herself admiring the woman, out of all others in the crew. Not the steady Wick, nor the ingenious Dr. Jain, nor even “Hunter,” who could sprint in an exo-armor suit that weighed over two hundred pounds. No, in the end it was Bebe whom Park found herself in awe of: a pillowy-cheeked botanist who specialized in space-bred plants.

  At their first meeting, Park asked the woman what she considered most important to her. Bebe answered without hesitation: “The perfection of my craft.”

  Park was taken aback. She read no lie in the botanist’s topology; there was no insincerity, no calculation. Bebe wasn’t motivated by thoughts of glory in settling a new colony. Wasn’t plagued by insecurities about proving her worth to the crew. She cared about nothing except her work. She wasn’t just dedicated to it, and didn’t just work hard at it; she had real passion for it. Park admired that. She wished she could say the same thing about herself.

  Tentatively, they became friends. Bebe, focused on her plant studies, seemed to take little notice of the stigma that Park carried with her as ISF’s “rat”; Park, in turn, was glad to have an acquaintance her own age. She found pleasure in watching Bebe devote herself to the mission—not even Keller did that, not fully—and hoped to model her own behaviors off of what she observed in the other woman.

  It was at this point that she learned it was possible to fool a phenotype analyst. A person could lie without knowing they were lying; they could make a false statement while their bodies and minds fully believed it to be true. In other words, she couldn’t read ‘truth’ from someone’s face—only ‘belief.’ Bebe had believed that the most important thing to her was her work—but this wasn’t true. For the first time Park realized how fragile her own craft really was. Everything she read, all of the data that she gathered and interpreted—it all depended on its source. And every source, being human, also held the possibility of being flawed.

  Bebe’s flaw was that she fell in love. With the young physicist, Eric Holt. They met a few weeks into the Antarctic training, and within a matter of days Bebe had morphed from a stolid, single-minded worker to a short, wet-eyed woman who sighed every time her boyfriend left the room. Suddenly she no longer cared about her specimens, her research on Eos’s potential plant life and soil composition; now it was all about Holt’s romantic gestures, the latest thing he’d said or done to vex her. Park was horrified—but it was too late to cut the connection, not without creating some very awkward dynamics within the biodome. So she had to bear it out.

  Every afternoon Bebe made it a point to seek Park out, flopping down into a nearby chair so she could rant about the latest development with Holt. “I’m not usually like this,” she would say to Park, wiping her eyes with her pinky fingers, so as not to smudge her makeup. “But I’ve never felt this way about someone before.” Park would only nod, never knowing what to say.

  Bebe complained about everything: Holt’s youthful cluelessness, his wandering eye, how when she said she loved him, he only smiled nervously and said, “Great.” And, when pressed: “That’s so great.” She pressured Park to give her opinions on Holt, on the other candidates who interacted with him, as if Park were her personal spy. “Do you think he’s sleeping with anyone else? Do any of the others notice him? Have you ever seen him flirting with anyone?”

  On and on. Now Bebe seemed to leap out of the most unexpected places: from behind a crate of rations as Park bent to grab a snack, from around a generator while Park tried to warm her hands. She demanded endless emotional conferences, roundtable discussions about who liked her or didn’t like her, about who had hurt her feelings that day or made her feel small when all she really wanted to do was be in love . . .

  Through it all Park had to fix a neutral expression on her face and offer calm words of affirmation and redirection, trying to prod Bebe towards focusing on her job. Park was part of the crew’s counseling team, she couldn’t turn anyone away—as much as she wanted to turn and run in a panic whenever she saw Bebe coming. She felt like a resident advisor at a university, rubbing freshmen’s backs while they wept about their roommates eating the last soyogurt in the fridge. At least Bebe did the minimal work to keep her plants alive; Park half-hoped she wouldn’t, so she could send her home. She was so disappointed.

  Other than the Bebe problem, however, Park was happy in Antarctica. At night she spent her free time watching documentaries about the first colonists, the pioneers who had settled Mars, Corvus, Io. That would be her, she thought, watching the pre-downloaded streams on her wrist console. Someday someone would make a documentary about her: about the psychologist who had kept the Eos expedition sane and in check. She hoped they would pull interviews from when she was still young. She didn’t want to be remembered as a misty-eyed old woman, shakily recalling adventures in space that could have been half-imagined.

  She had no other friends to speak of. Even laying aside her position on the fringes of the biodome’s community, Park simply didn’t have the time for friends: she had her hands full, wading through the neuroses and fixations of the newly formed village. No time to think of any of them on a personal level; no time to think of anything beyond the task at hand, really. Which she liked. After the Bebe fiasco, she thought, it was better to avoid the whole thing altogether. That way you couldn’t be let down.

  The weeks passed. One day she had a run-in with the biodome’s only android, a HERCULES model no one had bothered to name. The HERCULES was there to do any heavy lifting or manual labor a human couldn’t do: rapid repairs on the biodome if anything went wrong, accelerated rescue if one of the expedition members got lost on the ice. It was a primitive thing, not human-looking in the way that Park was used to: only a rough approximation of a man, skinless, with metal limbs that were bulky and golem-like. Most of the time it sat alone by the lookout tower, knees clasped, inert.

  That morning Park noticed it while she was eating breakfast in the mess tent. Austral summer had blown in; the HERCULES was squatting near the inside flap of the tent, and every time someone lifted the canvas to enter, blinding sunl
ight shot off of its chrome egg head and into Park’s eyes.

  “Could you move away from there?” she asked it. “You’re hurting my eyes.”

  “I apologize,” the HERCULES said in its tinny way, though it didn’t understand what she meant. It was unaware of the light coming from behind it, so it only shifted a few inches before settling down again with a clink. Park had to eat with one hand shielding the left side of her face. Meanwhile, the HERCULES watched her.

  “Do you need something?” Park asked finally, after she had finished dry-swallowing a dehydrated biscuit, letting it scrape past her throat.

  “No,” the HERCULES said.

  Something about the way it surveyed her face sent a line of heat running through Park’s stomach. It reminded her of Glenn, though the HERCULES had only the barest approximation of a crude metal face. But the eyes were the same: alert, liquidly understanding. Remote.

  “Who activated you?” Park asked it. “What is your protocol?”

  “I was told to observe,” the HERCULES answered. Its voice sounded metallic and raw, like the echoing of a sawblade.

  “Observe who? Observe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “They instructed me not to say.”

  Another prank, Park thought. Someone was “teaching” her what it felt like to be watched all the time. Observed. The best thing to do was to not react. “Take my tray away,” she said. “If you’re going to follow me around, you might as well help.”

  “That’s pretty funny,” Keller said afterward, when Park reported in with the HERCULES at her side. “Though childish beyond belief. I suppose you can’t deactivate it?”

  “Whoever issued the command told it not to stop until its protocols were satisfied,” Park said. “And to not reveal who they were. I think I just have to wait for it to stop on its own or return to the issuer for further instructions.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Keller said, studying the HERCULES’s tall steel frame. It was standing wordlessly next to her cot, watching the two of them with its head bent down at an awkward angle. “I wish ISF had given us a more recent model. The metal ones are so stupid.”

  “I don’t mind it so much,” Park answered. “Androids essentially behave the same in any form.” The HERCULES bent then to examine the packet of files at her feet; Park pushed its head away from her, open-palmed, like it was an inquisitive dog.

  “Well, just don’t bring it into your patient sessions,” Keller said. “People tend to get their guard up around androids. Plus there’s a matter of confidentiality: you never know what they’ll say or not say.”

  “I understand,” Park said, and then bit her tongue hard enough for it to bleed.

  The HERCULES dogged her silently for the rest of that day. Park stopped noticing it, largely, though she didn’t miss the quizzical or irritated glances of the candidates she went to visit. “What’s up with the clunker?” Michael Boone asked, rudely; the HERCULES surveyed him from over Park’s shoulder until Boone told it to fuck off, so that it retreated and watched them from afar. In a way the thing reminded her again of Glenn, the way he had accompanied her ceaselessly through the streets of New Diego; but where Glenn might have offered a quiet question, some sardonic commentary, the HERCULES only watched, and waited. At night, it stood outside of the doorway of her tent until frost crackled on its shoulders and the moon made it glow with white light.

  “Come in,” Park said after a while. When the android clunked in, she gave it some air-dropped magazines to look at and told it not to bother her. The HERCULES sat down beside her cot and leafed expressionlessly through an exposé on jungle fashion after the Comeback. Park turned back to her documentaries.

  “Why do you watch those?” the HERCULES asked, after an hour or so.

  “I like them,” Park answered. She didn’t pause her filmstream. “They’re educational. I can learn from the trials of others: these people had also never been in space, before they went to settle the colonies. But they still succeeded. I suppose it’s comforting for me to watch.”

  The HERCULES processed this. “There are other documentaries,” it said. “About cellular processes. Animals.”

  “I’m not interested in those,” Park answered, a little flatly. She had endeavored to study animal behavior when she was young, to have something to talk about with her uncle during his visits home; but he was dead now, and they had not spoken much before his death. “I prefer learning about humans.”

  “Why?”

  Park paused. “I just do,” she said after a moment.

  The HERCULES nodded a little, as if it found this answer satisfactory. Then it asked, seemingly apropos of nothing: “Why don’t you call anyone?”

  At this Park did stop the documentary. “What do you mean?”

  “Other people,” the HERCULES said. “People here in the biodome—they spend their nights calling loved ones. Telling them about their days. You don’t do that.”

  It was a statement, not a question. “I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about my day,” Park told it. “As a psychologist, most of my patient interactions are confidential. Plus, ISF doesn’t want us talking about why we’re here in the first place. It would be a boring conversation.”

  “You could converse about other things.”

  I don’t have anyone to call, Park almost said. She felt a clenching in her chest, a kind of hard-edged pain, like swallowing a stone. Isn’t it obvious? she thought. That’s why I’m leaving Earth. I don’t have anywhere else to go—or anywhere else to be.

  But then she thought: how did the HERCULES know what other people did, compared to her? Had it been ordered to watch others, too? And by whom? She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she didn’t know who had sent it, who might be watching her through it. What information would it be relaying back about her? Would the final report simply say that she was lonely? Connectionless? Unmoored?

  “Calling someone could reduce feelings of loneliness,” the HERCULES said, as if it knew her thoughts.

  “I like to be alone,” Park answered.

  The HERCULES watched her. Park tried to read some expression in its battered metal face, some hint of pity or sympathy or contempt. When it spoke, its voice was as hard and flat as a knife blade.

  “No,” it said. “I don’t believe you do.”

  * * *

  —

  Bebe Hill came into Park’s tent after that, puffy as a raincloud in her thermal jacket, swathed in a storm of tears. “It’s Eric,” she said, hiccupping thickly. “He won’t talk to me.”

  I’m tired, Park tried to say, but before she could open her mouth, Bebe sank down onto her cot without asking for permission. The HERCULES looked at Park for a directive, and she jutted her chin at the door. After it left, Park listened as Bebe blubbered something about an argument, Holt storming off in a rage, some kind of accusation being bandied back and forth.

  “You have to do a favor for me, please, Dr. Park,” Bebe said.

  I don’t do favors, Park nearly said, but instead screwed her mouth into a tiny frown and made a gesture to indicate she was listening. She didn’t fail to notice that Bebe had called her “doctor”—an attempt to butter her up, to bolster her sense of importance. But it had the opposite effect: it made her painfully aware that Bebe did not consider her a friend.

  “What do you want, Bebe?” she asked warily.

  “I need you to tell Eric something for me,” Bebe said.

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” the botanist exploded. “He won’t talk to me. Don’t you listen?”

  Park said nothing. Bebe, perhaps sensing her displeasure, calmed herself down a little; in meeker tones she said, “Please, could you calm him down? You’re the only one who can.”

  Park held back a noise.
She was tempted to send Bebe packing, or at least over to Dr. Keller, but from what she could glean from the weeping, it did seem that Holt was agitated about something. And that did fall into the realm of her responsibility—even if matchmaking didn’t. God damn Bebe, she thought. God damn the lies that faces told.

  “All right,” she said after a few more minutes of listening to Bebe cry. “Let me go and check on Holt. Stay here.” She pulled on her boots and parka, laboriously worked her gloves onto her fingers.

  “He’s in his tent,” Bebe sniffled.

  Where else would he be? Park thought irritably. The HERCULES was waiting outside her tent; it straightened its back as she came out, like a soldier saluting a superior. “Come along,” she said, not trusting it to refrain from interrogating Bebe. When they had trudged some distance away, the HERCULES asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

  Love, Park thought; or infatuation, or fear of dying in space alone. “She’s just upset,” she said, hoping it would leave it at that. The HERCULES nodded, as if it knew what it meant to be upset, and clunked after her through the snow. Its limbs jerked and twitched like a wind-up toy’s; through the aching rush of arctic air, Park could hear the rotors in its joints squealing and complaining. It needs maintenance, she thought vaguely—she would have to remember who the mechanical engineer in the biodome was. Sometimes it was hard to keep them all straight in her head. That girl Reimi Kisaragi was supposed to be good with robots, wasn’t she?

  She reached Holt’s tent, a standard-issue cosmonaut’s shelter stationed at the end of a long row of tents. She paused before the entrance—there was no real way to knock on a tent flap—and said, trying for briskness: “Holt, are you awake?”

  “Uh,” he said. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Dr. Park. I’d like to speak to you, if you’re free.”

  “Oh,” Holt said. Park thought she heard footsteps crunching through the snow behind her; it seemed to her that the HERCULES was pacing in little circles at her back. Holt twitched aside his tent flap and said in a sheepish whisper, “Sorry, Park, but now’s not really a good time . . .”