We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “And now you’re done,” she said. “For good.”

  “That’s right,” Park’s uncle said, motioning Glenn to step forward. “And I have to say, my timing is excellent: I’m glad I caught you before you left for school.”

  Park stood by and watched as he transmitted his medical routines into Glenn’s processor; Glenn took a moment to acclimate to the new data, then said, “I’ll go to the dispensary and pick up your prescription.”

  He nearly walked past Park without looking at her. Park put out a hand to stop him and said, “I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” Park’s uncle said, waving a hand at the chair across from him. The chair that Glenn usually sat in, so that his eyes were level with Park’s: a squat, sagging thing they’d fished out of a canal. “Stay here. Catch up with me, Grace.”

  “Be safe,” Park told Glenn, though the riots of previous years had quieted. There’d been the fiasco of a mob mistaking a human for a human-like android, at the peak of the protests. Then trials. Murder convictions. A reversal of goodwill, as there often was. Glenn smiled faintly at her and said, “I understand.”

  Reluctantly, Park walked over to the table and sat down across from her uncle. It had been a long time since she’d seen him last, at least in person; when she was younger he had videoed in once a month, but in the past few years the frequency had diminished. He kept ending the calls with praise of how independent and self-sufficient she was. Not how intelligent she was, or beautiful or mature—just that she displayed an ability to survive adequately without him, Park thought. She was wary of him: having him in her home felt like sheltering a wild animal. Routines were shattered, predictability flew out the window. She never knew what to say.

  Neither, it seemed, did he. “Well,” he said. “You’ve grown into a fine young woman. Your grades are excellent.”

  So he’d seen them, Park thought, surprised; though of course the school must have been transmitting them to him all this time. “They are,” she admitted.

  “You work hard,” her uncle mused. “Where are you going, again?”

  “New Boston,” Park said. “Hanson-Skinner University. I earned a scholarship.”

  A flicker of surprise crossed her uncle’s face. “Hanson,” he repeated. “The robotics designer—so you’re going for robo-psychology?”

  “No,” Park answered coolly. “Just human psychology.”

  “Funny,” he said, half to himself. “I wouldn’t think your interests lie there. You have to pass tests, you know. For empathy, amiability. Et cetera.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Well,” he said again. He had the air of dusting his hands off, though he didn’t actually move. “Good for you. Do you have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend?”

  “Neither,” Park said flatly. Despite herself, she could feel her neck reddening; she was glad that Glenn had left.

  “Hm,” Park’s uncle said. “Well, that in itself is no cause for concern.”

  He leaned back and drummed his hands against the worn, scuffed table; his ankle was resting on his knee in a way that Park found to be over-professorial, as if he ought to be in an armchair smoking a pipe. “Does Glenn cook the meals around here, or do you?” he asked.

  “Glenn does, for the most part. Though I’ve learned.”

  “You’re self-sufficient,” he said again. “That’s good. Good.”

  Park studied him closely for the first time since she’d sat down. She couldn’t see the resemblance in their faces, other than the seriousness of their expressions. Park’s hair and eyes were dark, her features slim and Asiatic; her skin was tanned, and there was a dusting of light freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her uncle, on the other hand, was pale-haired, the locks as soft and curly as a child’s, and he was permanently sun-burnt and flaking. His body was heavy and round. The skin on his hands seemed too papery for the amount of time he spent outside. Not for the first time she wondered if they were even blood-related, if he wasn’t simply a stepbrother to her father or even an adoptive stranger. She found herself wishing that he’d comment that she took after her mother.

  “You seem good,” she remarked, trying for courtesy. “Happy.”

  “I get by,” he replied. “It’s good to be home.” He looked around, and for the first time Park tried to see her module with a stranger’s eyes. It was as spotless as Glenn could make it, and she herself was a tidy person. But of course there were the obvious signs of living in a biodome like New Diego: the posters and wallpaper curling in the seaside humidity, the slumping furniture fashioned from scrap. Park’s uncle said, “I’m sure you’re glad to be out of this place soon. It’s a long airship ride to New Boston—a few days, if I’m remembering correctly. And you’ve never been in the air. You should prepare yourself.”

  “Why were you glad to catch me before I left?” Park asked. “You said that when we came in.”

  Her uncle turned back to her and blinked. “Because you would have taken Glenn with you,” he said.

  It felt as if her heart had jerked: a tight, vicious little movement. “And why would that be a problem?” Park asked calmly.

  “I wouldn’t want to spend the money to bring him back,” her uncle answered, with equal calm. “He’s staying here, of course. I need him.”

  * * *

  —

  After dinner, Park said that she was going on a walk. This was not implausible; the stuffy summer nights were finally cooling down, giving way to a fresher autumnal breeze that trickled through the vents before the hard drafts of winter set in. Glenn rose silently to accompany her, and Park’s uncle, watching the news on his wrist console, made no motion to object. When they had made their way down the street, Park remarked sourly, “I suppose we’ll be taking plenty of these from now on.”

  Glenn said, “His sickness is not as severe as he makes it seem. I believe on the current treatment routines he will recover within the year.”

  “Then maybe he’ll go off again and leave us alone,” Park thought aloud. She hadn’t told Glenn about her uncle’s plans to keep him in New Diego, not yet; not until she could figure out a way to persuade him to let Glenn go. She didn’t want to worry her bodyguard unnecessarily—and she was also a little afraid of his reaction. But the solution ought to be easy, Park thought. Her uncle only needed someone to administer his medicine, to help him with his daily routines. He didn’t need Glenn for that. Any cheap helper bot would do.

  Convenient, she thought bitterly. It was convenient that her uncle only thought it fit to return for good just as she was preparing to leave forever. Convenient that he was suddenly sick, after years in the field. Convenient that he had such a vested interest in keeping Glenn, when for years he hadn’t given him the time of day; had treated him like some kind of houseplant or reluctantly adopted dog.

  “You’re worried about something,” Glenn said. She looked at him, in the flickering green dimness of the bioluminescent streetlights. His face had not physically changed much over the years, of course—but there was a hidden depth to his expressions, beyond the flat, serious look. Watching her watching him, he remarked, “Your heart rate is elevated.”

  She reached out and touched his hair. The dark, downy thistle at the nape of his neck. “You need a haircut,” she said. They’d given androids that feature, a few years back, to make them even more lifelike; she imagined the developers arguing about the implications of it. ‘Do we want a way to tell them apart?’ ‘Do we want to make them more like us?’ ‘Why have half-measures when you could go all the way?’ In the end they chose to give the androids hair that grew, synthetic but very life-like. That way users could customize their androids’ appearances in more varied and pleasing ways—though the androids themselves seemed to find this more of a burden than a boon.

  Glenn looked unfazed by Park touching him. He stayed where he was, without pulling away. “I have exactly twenty-three days befor
e hair maintenance is due,” he told her.

  “Are you going to change it, or keep it at your default?”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “Let’s shave it bald,” Park said, “and paint your head silver.”

  Glenn frowned a little. “The paint would chip,” he said.

  “I was just joking.”

  “I understand,” he said. “So was I.”

  They walked together until they hit the edge of the biodome, staring out at the moon-glinting sea beyond the membrane. It was a strange thing, that wall, Park often thought: rubbery and flimsy to the touch, a semi-living transparent skin that filtered air and water and chemicals and molecules in and out of the city in a kind of constant autopoietic exchange. And yet, if you struck it, the membrane turned as hard and impenetrable as a diamond. There was something to be learned there, Park thought.

  She said, watching the silvered waves lap up against the curved wall: “We’ll be out of this place in a month, you know. Things will be different.”

  “Yes,” Glenn said. She couldn’t see his expression in the dark. “Some things will be different. Other things will not change.”

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon Park’s classmates approached her at lunch. This was rare; generally the other students preferred to pretend that Park wasn’t there, or else was some kind of exchange student or substitute teacher—an outside presence observing in the background, but whose intrusion was only minimal, temporary. When she was younger she’d thought this was because she was one of the few who weren’t optimized; her mother, of course, was a Dryad, a “feral” who’d vanished before giving her consent to have Park genetically augmented. As a result you could spot Park as a ‘genotypical’ in a heartbeat: her limbs weren’t willowy in that ethereal way, her eyes didn’t have that deep, optimized shine. Academically she managed to keep up, she had that much; but sometimes she showed a capacity for acne and short-sightedness, which was as good as having a hump. It was originally a spacer tradition to have their children genetically tweaked and tailored—their DNA sewed up in neat packages—but the movement had rapidly gained traction on Earth, among those who could afford it. Most people in the biodomes could, though only just. Park’s uncle, perhaps sensing the isolation that awaited his niece, had put the money towards cutting-edge android companions for her instead.

  It was for these reasons that Park had initially thought she was ostracized; her optimized classmates didn’t want to associate with a being of inferior genetic makeup. A person on the lower rung. But the other genotypical children—few that there were—had no problems banding together, forming their own little club. Park was left on the outskirts, looking in. “I’m different,” she’d said to Sally once, without tears; even as a child she’d been stony with resignation.

  “Not different,” Sally had told her, gently. “Just special.”

  Special, different, Park had thought at the time—it was semantics. It was all the same. It still got you ignored. Which was why it came as a surprise when she was approached at lunch, mere weeks before she was due to graduate high school.

  The approachers in question were a gaggle of girls that Park had silently labeled the alpha females of the school—a cluster of luscious-haired, chime-voiced beauties who had never so much as glanced in Park’s direction. She was sitting on the school steps, eating a butter sandwich when she heard them chattering nearby; she thought, not for the first time, that this must have been what aviaries sounded like, back in the day. What the jungles of the Comeback sounded like now: not silent and oppressive, as everyone imagined, but teeming with noise and honking, cackling life. Suddenly she caught the name Dataran, and tried not to look up—the group was discussing the topic of androids working as fashion models, now that you could style their hair, and how they never got too fat or old.

  “I think it’s creepy,” one girl said. “The way they walk. It’s too smooth. It’s like watching a hologram.”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” another said. “So fluid. I heard Paxia Berelle is one. She dances across the stage.”

  “No way,” the first girl said. “She blinks too much to be an android. You can always tell.”

  “No, you can’t. That Dataran thing was one all along, and no one knew.”

  “Someone did.”

  At this the little group turned to Park, who kept on eating her butter sandwich and staring at her console screen. A shadow fell across her wrist; reluctantly, she dragged her eyes up. One of the girls was standing over her. In the hard light Park couldn’t see who it was.

  “Grace,” the girl said sweetly. Ah, Park thought, refusing to squint; it was Alexia, a willowy, ringleted girl who had been in Park’s classes since the first grade. They had never spoken before. Her name always reminded Park of the medical condition that resulted in the inability to read—usually caused by brain damage.

  “Grace,” Alexia said again. “You knew about Dataran, didn’t you?”

  Park rose, to assume a position that was not subordinate to Alexia’s. She was still holding her half-eaten sandwich in one hand. Alexia looked at her with interest, and a kind of chilly amusement; her eyebrows were inked on in such a high arch that she seemed both perpetually astonished and bored. Park said, “What makes you say that?”

  “Well,” Alexia said, with a toss of her luxurious hair: “You’re so observant. You’re always observing everybody. And you’re very familiar with androids, aren’t you?”

  This was said with a tone of innocent admiration, but Park knew that it was a jab about Glenn, whom everyone had seen accompanying her to and from school. The other girls were watching; Park sensed a feeling of anticipation from them, as if they were waiting for the punch line of a good joke. So, she thought. It had to happen sometime. Since she’d been young she had expected some form of schoolyard fight. It was unexpected that it had come so late, in the last few weeks of her final year. She hadn’t done anything to provoke it, as far as she knew.

  “I don’t understand your line of questioning,” Park said coolly. Clouds skidded overhead; she could feel their shadows passing over her face.

  Alexia sighed a little, as if she was dealing with a sullen child who kept pushing away her food. “There’s no line,” she said, still smiling. “I’m just curious. You’re so smart and all. I’m sure you were able to tell.”

  “It was a while ago,” Park said in a flat voice. “A few years. I don’t remember.”

  Alexia was watching her, her eyebrows still in perfect arches. Another girl, behind her, said in honeyed tones, “So what about the one you’re always walking around with? That’s your chaperone, right?”

  My friend, Park wanted to say, or my family—but of course that would get her nothing but ridicule. So she said nothing, only held onto her dampening sandwich, waiting. Just get it over with, she wanted to say. Say whatever cruel thing you really mean. It was all a performance, a ritual, maneuvers to establish dominance, extinguish threats. Park didn’t have the patience to learn the steps.

  “I had a chapbot when I was little,” Alexia said with a breathless little laugh. “My parents got rid of it when I was twelve. I wonder what happened to it.” She smiled at Park. “I should care more. It practically raised me.”

  It must have been defective, Park thought. It didn’t do a very good job. But she only said, “It was probably recycled.”

  “Probably,” Alexia said with an elegant shrug. “I wonder what’s going to happen to yours, when you leave school?”

  Park said nothing. Alexia, perhaps growing impatient with her, plowed onward, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “You know,” she said, “they’re thinking of getting rid of them—the nannybots, anyway. Too many husbands caught fucking them! Isn’t that sick?”

  “People are always doing strange things,” Park said woodenly.

  Their wrist consoles flashed,
then, indicating that it was time to return to class. The girls behind Alexia made disappointed little clucks, as if someone had failed to finish an exciting story and was asking them to wait until later. And there would be later, Park thought, watching their retreating backs as they flowed into the school building. They’d locked on; they wouldn’t be finished with their target until they got their satisfaction. She’d have to be wary, come to battle armed. But why her, why now? She thought, a little hopelessly, about what she was going to go to school for. Maybe she should switch to robo-psychology. She was better at it—and she wouldn’t have to deal with people like these.

  After school, she saw Glenn standing impassively by the gate as usual. He looked no different from a distance, but upon coming closer she thought she could read something like concern in the angle of his shoulders, or puzzlement. She approached and saw someone talking to him, or rather at him, since Glenn was neither looking at them nor responding. Sudden fear and rage swept her in a dark acidic wave. It was Alexia, standing there boldly with one of her boyfriends.

  “Respond,” she was saying as Park glided up behind them. “Answer. Reply.”

  “It’s probably defective,” her boyfriend said. This was Harry Bip, Park realized, with the sculpted jaw and the hands that could crush a melon; his parents had had him optimized for a sports scholarship, before they’d understood that sports were going extinct. Not enough room, in the post-Comeback world—and no use for it if you were bound for the colonies. Now they were trying to pass him off as a future combat specialist. Park couldn’t imagine him specializing in anything other than eating enough junk food to fuel his overgrown body and adjusting himself when he thought no one was looking.

  “It’s not defective,” Alexia said. “The freak probably programmed it not to talk to anybody but her.”

  Glenn’s eyes flicked to Park, over Alexia’s shoulder. His mouth formed a faint frown. Alexia, sensing the look, began to turn, but before she could see Park properly, Park said, “What are you doing?”