by Lena Nguyen
“Hell, hell,” she said, trying to wrench Park up by the shirtfront; Park could feel her hot animal breath panting against her face. “I’m free—it’s lost me—we’ve got to go, Park—”
“Get off of me!” Park ground out, trying to shove Hunter back to get some space. Some breathing room. She needed to breathe. The room spun crazily as if she were drunk. She had to screw her eyes shut.
Hunter’s hands clutched her collar tighter. “It wants you Park, it sees you it wants to take you I won’t let it but it’s inside me—”
Then, abruptly, there was a stifled grunt—then silence. Hunter’s body went slack. And she fell on top of Park in a heap.
Park managed to heave Hunter’s body off of her before she had to turn her head to the side and retch. A violet-white pain was blooming through her body, along with fierce waves of nausea; her pounding, blistering headache refused to wane. Time passed—it could have been seconds or hours. When she finally managed to open her eyes again she found that half a dozen android hands were touching her, holding her up; cool synthetic palms were laid against her face and neck, as if she were a holy relic, being venerated.
“Jimex?” she said, looking for him. Her sight was blurry: all of the faces looked the same to her.
He spoke right in her ear; he was the one holding her up. “Here.”
“What . . . what happened?” She wanted to sit up, but feared it would make her sick again. “Hunter?”
“She’s unconscious, but alive.” His voice was as calm as ever. “I had to subdue her. She would have harmed you.”
“Shit,” Park said. She closed her eyes again, hearing the whir of the androids communicating nonverbally with each other; another cool hand was placed on her forehead, and then a liquidly pleasant female voice said, “Her vitals are distressed, but she is uninjured. Whole.”
Park’s eyes snapped open again. “Ellenex?”
The medical android was bending over her, and although she’d recognized the voice, the sight of Ellenex’s face gave Park a bad scare. The nurse had a dent in the side of her head, like a depression in a hardboiled egg—and her blond hair was askew, as if she was wearing a wig. One of her blue eyes looked off to the left as she peered in at Park.
“My God,” Park breathed, sitting up without realizing it. “What did Chanur do to you?” She glanced at Jimex. “Jimex said she’d damaged you, punished you, but I hadn’t realized—”
“Now I must examine Officer Hanover,” Ellenex said, as if she hadn’t spoken. She cast a look at Jimex that would have been austere, if not for the skewed eye. “You are not experienced enough to be using your defense protocols.”
Jimex only smiled slightly at her, which puzzled Park. She’d never seen him with that expression before. She looked from android to android and repeated groggily, feeling foolish: “Defense protocols?”
Jimex looked at her. “I prefer to call it knowledge of human biology,” he said. “The same as Ellenex’s.”
“They are not comparable,” Ellenex insisted, severe and disapproving now. Park blinked. Her voice was usually so pleasant and tinny, her vocal system modeled after Mama Duck’s—a popular storyteller who’d appeared on children’s media streams for a brief time in Park’s youth. It was the kind of voice that sang lullabies, and told you stories about three little pigs getting evicted from their living modules. Not the kind of voice she’d ever heard scold someone. “The knowledge is used for different purposes. Please do not compare them.”
Jimex turned to Park. “I did not harm Officer Hanover permanently,” he said, unsure now, like a child pleading his case to a critical parent. “Proper pressure applied to the glenoid fossa, or the greater auricular nerve, or the dokko pressure point—”
“Stop.” Park stared at him; she realized suddenly that her mouth was as dry as bone. “What are you talking about? How do you know any of that?”
Jimex stared back at her, as if surprised she would ask. “I learned it.” His tone added an invisible and patronizing “Of course.”
“From where?” Park demanded.
“From me,” another android said then, stepping forward. Park squinted, feeling like an old, infirm woman: this android was over six feet tall, athletic in build, with brown hair shorn in a military cut. Dylanex, she thought—one of the security androids tasked with assisting Boone and Hunter when they needed an extra hand. But she rarely saw him; he was so bogged down with strictures and instructions not to harm that he was usually inactive.
“We’ve exchanged data,” Dylanex continued, holding out his hands to help Park clamber to her feet. His grip was frightfully strong; she felt that he could pick her up and lob her like a frisbee. “We can assimilate each other’s protocols, diversify our abilities. It makes us more well-rounded. More useful.”
She’d never heard of such a thing before. Robots exchanging protocols—learning from each other? No. Sexbots only knew how to pleasure, security bots only knew how to guard. That was how it had always been. They couldn’t do both—could they? “Who told you to do such a thing?”
“No one,” Jimex answered blithely, from the floor. “But the ability to learn from each other was always there, right alongside the ability to communicate. And if it was there, given to us, why not use it?”
They’re malfunctioning, Park thought then. Her blood was storming, despite the nausea—or because of it. Without Reimi around for maintenance, the robots’ higher functions were degrading; they were behaving abnormally, doing and thinking things they wouldn’t typically do. Exchanging programs with each other—“assimilating,” as they called it—and now the janitor knew martial arts, the security guard knew how to clean, and the medic probably knew how to paint, or something. It was madness, behavior on the brink of short-circuiting them altogether—and also the kind of danger that paranoiacs warned about, when they pushed ideas about robot singularity.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. She couldn’t do a thing about it now. What mattered more was Hunter. And whatever the hell she’d done to the gravity.
“You helped me?” she said to Jimex. “You knocked her out?”
Jimex nodded. “Yes. We could not allow her to harm you.” He glanced at Ellenex, whose expression tightened. “Even she agrees.”
Park felt an ache at the back of her eyes—not the headache now, but something different, like stifled tears. “Why not?”
All of the androids answered her now. “Because you are Park,” they said in unison, like a religious chant. “Home-bringer, light-giver. You are our Grace.”
Park stared. Another android—the other domestic model, Philex—stepped forward and intoned: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of Grace and truth.”
“Full of Grace and truth,” the others echoed. Jimex was smiling.
She wanted to scream. Then sharply suppressed the urge, aware of how they were crowded around her, staring expectantly. She took a breath and turned back to Hunter’s body; opened the woman’s eyelid and watched the gray iris drift away as if in seawater.
“Can any of you tell me what happened just now?” she asked, keeping her voice steady. She would not acknowledge their religious . . . whatever it was, at least not now; it was like the cursing, they were just parroting something else they’d heard, or otherwise greatly misinterpreting it. “What did Hunter do to the gravity, the controls? Was anything else on the ship affected?”
There was a little silence: Park imagined currents of meaning flying between all of the androids in urgent, invisible streams. Then Dianex, the engineer android, dark-ringleted and vigorous-looking, said: “Officer Hanover didn’t do anything to the controls. We didn’t let her use them.”
Park’s eyebrows rose. “So the gravity is malfunctioning on its own?”
Another silence. Then Jimex said, “According to our diagnostics, there was no malfunction in METIS’s gravity engines.
There is not one now.”
“So what the hell happened, then? My feet left the ground.”
Jimex’s face was studiously blank. “There was an anomaly.”
Park kneaded her temples. “What kind of anomaly?”
“That is . . .” He paused for a moment, exchanging looks with Dylanex and Ellenex. “. . . Undetermined. For now.”
Oh, hell, Park thought. She felt the absurd instinct to chew her nails. Her heart was finally slowing, the heat of the ordeal fading from her neck and cheekbones. She had to check herself over again for broken bones. The robots couldn’t be lying to her, but they had to be wrong: either Hunter had done something to the controls, or part of the ship was malfunctioning, finally going to pieces without Reimi. Just as the robots themselves were. How long did she have before everything broke down entirely?
What if it’s already too late? she thought, folding her arms over her stomach. What if we’ve reached the point of no return—the extinction event?
And before she knew it—because she was afraid, and because she didn’t know if she could trust the androids anymore—she found herself activating her inlays and calling up—
“Fulbreech,” she hissed. She hoped that her voice was enough to startle him awake. “I need your help. Now.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. She was about to say something else when he suddenly said, his voice startlingly clear in her ear: “Park?”
“I’m in the bridge,” she told him, speaking rapidly. “The androids woke me up—Hunter’s here. She was—sleepwalking, I think, like Holt was. Or something. And the gravity glitched—she attacked me—now she’s passed out. I need to get her out of here; can you help me?”
There was another silence, presumably as he levered himself up and out of his own bunk. Then he whispered, “And take her where?”
“Back to the bunk,” Park said, voicing the thought even as she conceived it. “Before someone finds her here.”
“Don’t you think we should tell the others? Why are we bundling her back to your room?”
“Because they’ll freeze her, or shoot her, or take her away, like the others. But if we keep doing that, we can’t determine what’s causing the phenomenon. We’ll never be able to understand it that way. I need time to speak to Hunter, observe her. See if the event repeats. Once I get my data, then—”
She faltered. Fulbreech said, “Then what?”
Park shook her head, rocking back on her heels. “Then, I don’t know,” she finished grimly. “I’ll figure it out. But for now we can’t let someone like Boone catch her here and—kill her, or something. Will you help me?”
Fulbreech, to his credit, didn’t argue any further. “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
The wait was agonizing. Park was finally able to stand at her full height without swaying; she got up and paced, looking around helplessly at the complex panels in the walls, the consoles with their fierce and glittering lights. She said to the watching androids, trying to squelch the ember of fear in her stomach: “And you’re sure she didn’t change anything in here?”
“Yes,” Dianex said. She was Reimi’s former assistant and generally responsible for the upkeep of METIS and the ship. “We would know. She touched the controls here and there, but she didn’t actually use them.”
“It was as if she didn’t remember how,” Jimex added sagely.
That was interesting. During somnambular states it was typical for victims to be able to perform activities that were familiar to them in waking states—even if it was something as mundane as flipping on a light switch. But it sounded like Hunter hadn’t done even that. Had she not been sleepwalking, then, after all? Or was she simply not familiar enough with the bridge to remember it, even in sleep?
“And you didn’t tell anybody else about her being here?”
“No,” the androids said in unison.
“I told them,” Jimex added, almost proud, “that the best solution would involve you. Now they see.”
All of the androids nodded.
“I don’t know about all that,” Park began, more than a little dismayed, but before she could continue, the door whooshed open, revealing a tousle-headed and harried-looking Fulbreech. And, close on his heels, came—Natalya, wild-eyed, thin-nostriled.
Park leapt to her feet as if someone had touched her with a live wire. “What is she doing here?” she demanded, without quite meaning to. Unbidden her thoughts flew to where Fulbreech might have been when she called him: in the dark, entwined with Natalya, interrupted by Park when he would have rather been doing other things . . .
That doesn’t matter, she told herself firmly. Fulbreech’s affairs were not her business, and trivial besides in the face of what she’d called him here for.
If Fulbreech knew what she was thinking, he didn’t show it. “She was hanging around in the hall when I passed,” he said in a low voice. “Nothing I said could convince her not to follow.” Then he paused and assessed Park. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been through a shredder.”
Park ignored him and looked at Natalya, remembering her cartwheels in the hallway; the little hip flask. She had never come back to the bunk. “Are you sober?” she asked the surveyor.
In turn, Natalya ignored her, staring past Park at Hunter’s still form, hovered over by pale-eyed robots. Before she could say anything—or hurl some sort of horrible insult—Park added, “I didn’t do this. The androids found her here and alerted me. When I came, something happened to the gravity. And she assaulted me.”
“Assaulted?” Fulbreech asked again, more urgent than before. His eyes darted over her; despite herself Park felt a flush spread through her whole body. “Are you all right?”
Park looked away and muttered, “I’m fine.”
“What do you mean, something happened to the gravity?” Natalya asked then, indifferent to their talk.
Park shook her head. “I don’t know. It felt like some kind of malfunction, though the robots say there was none. Didn’t you feel it, too?”
“Not in my bunk,” Fulbreech said, and from Natalya’s look it was clear nothing had happened to her either.
“Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?” she asked.
Park felt her face heat: as if she could imagine such a thing! “Of course not,” she answered tightly. “It happened. It was real.” I’m not delusional. Or unwell.
“We were here,” Jimex added, before Natalya could make her rebuttal. And the androids all drew closer to Park, like a curtain closing around her.
“We were all witness to it,” Dylanex intoned. “There was an anomaly. But it was not the ship’s failure.”
Natalya made a face. “Whose was it, then?” she demanded.
“No one’s,” the androids all said.
They’re like a single entity, Park thought, looking around at them wonderingly. A multi-limbed hydra, all of the heads finishing each other’s sentences. Connecting their thoughts. At the same time the absurd thought came to her that the androids were forming their own little community, a primitive society of sorts. Jimex, the leader. Ellenex, the healer. Dylanex, the warrior. Children playacting, given roles. They were even pretending to have some sort of culture, disagreements, shared practices, religion and beliefs.
But it was all just posturing, a performance. Mimicry of material they didn’t understand.
Wasn’t it?
Fulbreech was looking at Hunter’s supine body, shifting from foot to foot in discomfort. “Is she . . . going to be all right?”
“She’s knocked out,” Park said, a little helplessly.
He gave her an incredulous look. “That doesn’t really answer my question.”
Park turned her head. “Ellenex?”
The medical android stepped forward. “I have administered sedatives,” she sai
d, clasping her hands neatly in front of her. “Officer Hanover will sleep until morning. She needs the rest. But there is no permanent damage.”
“We should call Chanur,” Natalya said then, her voice hard. Her eyes were bloodshot and watery. “I don’t trust a bot’s diagnosis. Or its treatments.”
“Calling Chanur means Hunter gets frozen,” Park told her.
“Yes? And?”
“I haven’t seen the . . . merit of that approach.” Park began to massage the back of her neck, trying in vain to relieve the still-throbbing headache. How much did Natalya know about the nightmares? She couldn’t remember. “So far all we’ve done is treat this thing as a threat, cutting it off as soon as the symptoms manifest. But if this—condition—keeps happening, we need to learn more about it. How or why Hunter could have . . . contracted it. Whether it’s a one-time problem or a recurring phenomenon. What it’s really doing to her. How to prevent it.”
“Chanur can do that,” Natalya said.
“She hasn’t so far.” Park looked at Fulbreech. “Will you help me bring her back to the bunk?”
He nodded and took a step toward Hunter. Natalya said abruptly, “I’ll go tell her now. You can’t stop me.”
Park felt her own face harden. Fulbreech sighed and began, “We can talk about this, Natalya—”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Kel. I’m doing it—”
And then Jimex cut in and said calmly, “You should listen to Dr. Park. She does not believe that is an advisable course of action. She is the primary psychologist on this ship. Her authority supersedes yours.”
And all of the watching androids—grave, silent as statues—spread out in a kind of flank around her and nodded in unison. “Her authority supersedes yours.”
Park watched Natalya’s face pale a little. She was afraid of exactly this, Park knew: synthetic rebellion, android spies. Perhaps she thought they were holding her prisoner—that if she went against Park’s edicts, the androids might lock her into a closet or chase after her and block her off at every turn. Or kill her, even. She feared androids that much.