We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Then she took in her surroundings, dark as they were. After a while grainy features began to sharpen into a clearer picture. Drawn curtain, sterile walls. Herself nestled in a diagnostic pod, with an observation shield up on all sides. She was in the medical bay.

  They must have given me sedatives, Park thought. Heavy ones. She could feel the cold, clammy sheen of sweat on her brow, but couldn’t lift her arm to brush it away. Maybe I was thrashing in my sleep.

  Then a splash of horror, caustic and chilly. Maybe I was sleepwalking, like Hunter. Like Holt.

  God, she thought, wanting to scream. It really is spreading—!

  Then the sedatives rushed in again, quieting her nerves, drawing a gray veil over her brain and affect. No, Park told herself. She’d gone down into the belly of the ship of her own volition. She’d been wide awake when she saw the stranger in the canteen. And she hadn’t had a nightmare. She’d dreamt of Glenn, and—and other things. But those had been real memories. Real thoughts. Not . . . whatever was going around.

  She nearly laughed at herself. It was wrong to think of it as a disease, a defect. But it felt as if this ship they were trapped on was a rotting corpse; a bloated, beached thing washed up on an alien shore. Slowly decaying from within. Of course the only thing they could find inside was darkness—and strange, unknown maladies.

  She could hear the sounds of an android moving around beyond the curtained darkness of her room. Ellenex, she thought. Park was shivering; she thought to call the medical unit in, but she was afraid of what Ellenex would tell her. Of what might have happened when she was asleep. What they planned to do with her. Sagara had been with her when she’d lost consciousness, she remembered. Surely he thought she was insane, after that display. It was almost a surprise that she’d woken up at all—that he hadn’t already consigned her to the freezer.

  She lay back against the stiff foam pillow they’d provided: an unexpected luxury. Not Chanur’s doing. Then who had brought her here? She remembered voices from down the hall, right after Sagara caught her from falling. Who had come looking for them? Had they taken her away from Sagara? Away from danger?

  Or had they put her in it?

  And what about the stranger? Had anyone found him?

  Did he have anything to do with Park losing consciousness?

  Dully Park could hear the thudding of her own heart, as if she were listening to someone else’s. I must have fainted, she thought. The physical strains of the mission—of everything, from the shooting to the blackout—had pushed her to her limit. It was a simple enough explanation. She had never left Earth before. She was unprepared for the stresses that awaited her in space. There was no need to let her other anxieties complicate it. Right?

  She tried to look at her hands in the dark. Even though she had never left the Deucalion, her time on Eos was taking its toll—she couldn’t imagine the physical effects it was having on the actual expedition members. Already the ends of her thumbs were fissuring, her skin drying out from the dry, cold air. She was afraid that her face would wither—then felt surprised by her own concern. Since when had she been vain? But somehow it still seemed to matter, what she would look like when they went home.

  If we make it home, she thought, with a sudden kind of bitter rage. She thought back on her dream—her memories, flapping around in the alcove of her brain like bats. “It’s all right, Grace, I’m here.” That was what Glenn had told her, that day they’d lost Dataran. She’d questioned her own sanity then, too. “I’ll always be here.”

  Only he wasn’t, Park thought, gritting her teeth against the acid rush of feeling. He wasn’t here with her. In a way, he never had been.

  Suddenly she became aware of voices, somewhere beyond the curtain that separated her module from the rest of the medical bay. Male voices, familiar ones, moving through the hall outside. There was the faint sweep of utility lights; the sound of Ellenex or whichever android it was scurrying out of their way. Fulbreech’s voice, Park thought, recognizing him first. And Boone. Arguing about—her?

  “She’s going the way of Holt and Ma,” Boone said, not bothering to hush his voice. “I’m not surprised.”

  “No,” Fulbreech said in a harsh whisper. “If she says she saw something, then she saw it.”

  “Did you see it?”

  A pause. When Fulbreech didn’t answer, Boone said with contempt, “She saw a mirage.”

  “Mirages are optical illusions caused by light rays and temperature changes, Boone. I think what you mean is a hallucination.”

  Boone grunted. “Whatever.”

  Fulbreech said, almost to himself: “But what on earth was she doing down there with Sagara?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. I hope she hasn’t gotten to him.”

  “Gotten to him?”

  “You know. He’s such a hardass about everything. He thought she went down there to cause the blackout. You saw how pissed he was when he found out she was gone. So why hasn’t he frozen her, like everyone else who did something stupid and broke the rules? Like Holt?” A meaningful pause. “Park got to him.”

  Fulbreech, too, was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know. He still seems pretty pissed off. And where the hell is Wick?”

  “Busy.”

  “And you—you’re too busy to investigate this?”

  “You’re damn right I am,” Boone said. “I’m not going to go chasing ghosts all over the ship just because the shrink thought she saw something. She’s losing it. Have you seen her? She looks like she’d get spooked by anything that’s not a clunker.”

  “There’s something you need to understand about Park,” Fulbreech said then. There was a quality to his voice that Park couldn’t identify: she couldn’t tell if he was speaking fiercely or with great reverence. “She’s different from you and me.”

  “Yeah,” Boone retorted. “She’s from Earth, for one thing. She’s not really ISF, for another. And she also seems to lack a human heart.”

  “No,” Fulbreech insisted. “I mean she sees things. Really sees them. It’s in your best interest to try and understand.”

  The two men were silent after that. Park thought she could see their outlines, gray against the curtained partition. She was afraid to breathe, for fear that they would hear her and come in. After a while Boone said, “Whatever. It’s neither here nor there. With Hunter about to get fridged, I don’t have the time or resources for this shit.”

  “So they decided to freeze her after all?” There was sympathy in Fulbreech’s voice. Typical of him, Park thought. Nice even to guys like Boone.

  “Seems like it,” Boone growled. For a moment Park thought she could hear genuine distress in his voice. “I don’t get why Severov keeps pushing for it. Saying she fucked around with the controls. I mean, METIS.” He snorted. “As if. One of my guys.”

  “She’s scared of whatever’s happening,” Fulbreech said. “She wants it contained, no matter who it is. Her entire biodome got taken out by some kind of sickness when she was a kid. And what with everything that’s been going on . . .”

  “If that’s the case, then why isn’t your little girlfriend in quarantine?”

  “She’s not a danger to anyone,” Fulbreech said, his voice now cold.

  “Neither is Hunter,” Boone said. “And at least she’s not seeing things that aren’t there.”

  Afterward, after they had left the medical bay again and the android outside had gone back to silently sorting tools, Park turned on her side and began to cry. The tears never went down her face; they only rimmed the edges of her closed eyelids like hot glue. She felt empty, raw, scrubbed clean of her insides and packed to the brim with foam peanuts instead. Oh, Fulbreech, she thought. What did he think she saw? She thought back to what Natalya had said. You could observe, you could see and take in every little detail if you had to—but it meant nothing if you didn’t understand
what you were looking at. She was like a scavenger back on Earth, a Dryad rooting around in the foliage and undergrowth, searching for artifacts that no longer meant anything. The hope was that these items could be valuable, that they could be bartered off in exchange for a few more days of survival—but the Dryads didn’t know what it was they were collecting. They didn’t know what the things really meant.

  And it was a perilous situation. Just like hers. Yes, Park decided, the comparison was apt. Contrary to what Fulbreech thought, she couldn’t see anything. She was like a masked wild person, navigating the treacherous roots and traps of the Comeback. Bent over, fumbling around. Afraid to miss a step in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  She’d asked Glenn, once, if he ever dreamt. “What happens when androids deactivate for the day?” she asked.

  “We enter power-saving mode, generally,” he replied. “Our energy is rerouted to performing maintenance. Upkeep. Cleaning up and defragmenting what we’ve processed since the last time we deactivated.”

  The human brain did the same thing, Park would think later. It shut down, went into restoration mode. Released gamma waves to repair the miniscule wear and tear of everyday life. It took the time to ingrain memories, clear out debris. Without sleep human beings went insane, or died. Robots, too, broke down into disrepair—or shut off altogether.

  “But do you dream?” Park had repeated, back then. “Do you see things while you’re deactivated? What do you think about?”

  Glenn had frowned, thinking. “I know the definition of a dream,” he said. “A vision that one experiences when one is asleep. But I don’t know what happens when I enter ‘sleep’ mode. Not in that way.”

  “So you don’t see anything?”

  He’d hesitated. “Not in a way that I can relay to a human.”

  There was a long silence after that. She’d wanted to ask him to try, but that might have been going too far—she didn’t want to risk burning his circuits.

  “If you have different programs running,” Park said later, “when you turn off, to reformat and process your memories—does that mean every time you wake up, it’s a different version of you?”

  Glenn had smiled at her. “There is no ‘me,’” he said. “Only a version of the thousands of units of Glenns.”

  “That version is you,” Park insisted. “You’re different from everything else.”

  He’d laughed lightly, a sound like pent-up steam hissing from a pipe. “I’m different because you’re different,” he said. “I am what you require me to be.”

  * * *

  —

  She slept again, uneasily, raising her mental fists in preparation to fend off another dream. Another memory. Thankfully, this time she dropped into bottomless sleep, and when she woke again, the lights were on and a silhouette was standing behind her curtain. Waiting.

  Park sat up but didn’t call out. “Who is it?” sounded feeble and imploring, like an old frightened woman afraid to answer the doorbell. Better to wait and see what the shadow did. For a horrible instant she thought it might be the stranger, come to silence her—it certainly wasn’t Fulbreech, whose shape she thought she could recognize easily by now, or Sagara. She could move again; the fuzziness of the sedatives was wearing off. And the observation shields were down. When she looked around for a weapon to defend herself, all she could see was her bedside table, with a spoon and a cup of vita-gel for her to eat. Park grabbed the spoon, held it in a reverse-grip. Her heart was rapping inside her chest like someone pounding their fist on a door. She wondered how long it would take someone to come if she screamed.

  As if on cue, the figure outside the curtain stirred. A head appeared between the drapes. “Get up,” Boone said. “And get dressed. Chanur says you’re fine.”

  Park resisted the urge to draw her blanket up to her chin. She looked at him, despite her tousled hair, yesterday’s decksuit, the grit and salt in her eyes. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “I heard from Fulbreech,” Boone said, “that you think someone’s aboard the ship.”

  Park said nothing. Obviously he didn’t know she’d overheard his earlier conversation. Had he come to bully her? Threaten her? In the half-dark she couldn’t see his expression; his body was still partially hidden by the curtains. “What do you need?” she asked again, warily. She hadn’t lowered her spoon.

  She didn’t expect what he said next. “You’re going to help me look,” Boone said. “Come on, get up.”

  Slowly, cautiously, Park swung her legs out, testing her returning mobility; she winced at the thought of putting her bare feet on the cold metal floor. “Look for what?”

  Boone threw her an impatient glance; seeing her still sitting there in her pod, he came all the way into the room and looked around. Bending, he flung her boots at her from a little storage locker on the floor. “Look for the thing,” he said curtly. “I mean the guy. The guy you saw.”

  Park pulled her shoes on; the straps gave a satisfying magnetic click. “You believe me?”

  Boone didn’t answer. “We’ve got to keep it quiet,” he said instead. “Don’t tell fucking anyone. If we have another manhunt like we did for Holt, all hell’s going to break loose. So we get this done quietly. Got it?”

  “Where’s Fulbreech?”

  “Off somewhere. He’s looking, too.”

  She felt a lurch of dismay, and also relief—twice the amount of people looking meant they might find evidence to validate her, or twice the humiliation if she was again proven wrong and nothing turned up. She lowered herself to the floor carefully, as if her legs had atrophied, and said, “I combed every part of Deck B that I could think of. Where are we supposed to look next?”

  “Every place you didn’t think of,” Boone answered, scowling.

  “Boone,” she said when he turned away.

  “What?”

  She tried not to falter under his gaze; she felt pinned to the spot. His eyes were hot and scalding, like the sweep of a spotlight. “I don’t know if it was really—if I saw correctly,” Park said. “I’m only acting off of what I believed I saw.”

  “I know,” Boone said. “And if that were the case, I’d say you were crazy and tell Chanur to feed you some of your pills until we got home.”

  She waited, a kind of realization rolling around tightly in her brain. “But?”

  He turned his back to her. In the strange, unnatural light, his body looked like a sliver of empty space, a jagged shape in the air. “But you’re not the only one,” Boone said. “I saw him, too. The fucker murdered Wick.”

  18.

  Park felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest. “What did you say?” Her own voice sounded foreign to her—it lacked, disconcertingly, any of the emotion she was feeling within. It did not sound as if she were shocked, or horrified, or even sad; and she remembered then what Boone had said to Fulbreech, about her lacking a human heart.

  But Boone himself merely looked impatient, as if he were relaying some mundane chore she needed to get done rather than the death of his own commander. “The guy killed Wick,” he repeated. “In our room. I saw him running off just as I got there, but I had to help Wick, and—well. It was too late by then. I told Sagara, but he doesn’t believe me. Or you, for that matter. So he’s put everybody on lockdown and wants to interrogate us one by one.” He shook his head. “But fuck that. I’m not sitting in a cell, waiting for a fucking murderer to get me next.”

  Park felt her own lips moving aimlessly, forming shapeless words to herself. It felt as if her brain had turned to wet cement. Wick was—dead? Killed by this stranger? Shit, was all she could think. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn’t even muster the energy to feel grief. Could she have done something? If she’d told others about the stranger sooner—if she’d told Wick—

  “He was a good man,” Park said aloud. Her slow-moving brain told her that it was the
correct thing to say, under such circumstances.

  Boone’s expression didn’t change. “Now he’s a dead one,” he told her. “And we’ll all be next if we don’t catch this bastard.”

  In a stupor, she began to follow him out of the room, squinting against the lights of the medical bay, the red glow of panels indicating empty rooms. She felt drunk; colors swayed and shifted in a nauseating fashion. No one else was in sight—not Fulbreech or whatever android she’d heard standing guard earlier.

  When had the power come back on? Park wondered dazedly. At least they wouldn’t have to hunt for the murderer in the dark. “How did he kill him?”

  A muscle in Boone’s jawline twitched. “Blunt force trauma,” he grunted. “Split his head open like an egg.”

  “Did he—suffer?”

  Boone’s body was stiff and taut, like a bowstring stretched to its limit. “I don’t think so,” he said finally, speaking with some difficulty. “But I don’t know.”

  She shook her head as they made their way toward the white circle that indicated the medical bay’s exit. “And who’s commanding officer now?”

  Someone stepped into the pale dazzle of the threshold, blocking their exit. “That would be me,” they said.

  Park’s heart lurched into her throat. Sagara was standing there, glaring at them both; he looked surreal against the sterile whiteness of the medical bay in his black uniform, like a vampire or a massive crow. Park didn’t miss that he now had weapons holstered at his belt: the hilt of a thermal-loaded energy blade, she thought, squinting, as well as the sleek black shape of a railgun. Devastating things, especially compared to Boone’s now-paltry electrolaser. She didn’t miss, either, how the combat specialist moved protectively to shield her from Sagara’s gaze. Did that mean they were allies now, she and Boone? He would defend her against the likes of Sagara, when he’d once been her greatest threat? The idea was nearly laughable—she remembered how he’d pointed that gun in Jimex’s face—but here he was, placing himself in bodily danger to defend her. What did that mean about Sagara, then—that he was more dangerous than Boone, just as he’d once thought Chanur was more dangerous than Park? The bigger threat to confront, even if you had to defeat it together? How quickly the alignments had shifted; how quickly they all turned on one another, retracting enmities, altering histories.