We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  HARE: Please. Do not exert yourself. Your oxygen—

  [Taban sits up.]

  Taban: Or maybe I should just tell you. But what happens if you break, or run out of power before they get here? What if your memory gets damaged and you forget me?

  HARE: Please. We should move—

  Taban: It’s this fucking planet. North becomes south, ice becomes wave, ship disappears—Daley sees a man and a ferrox—

  [He falls silent.]

  Taban: What am I going to see?

  HARE: Me. I am with you.

  [Taban’s face contorts, and he gives a shuddering sob before patting the HARE on the head. Then he tries to scratch something into the ice again, but his slippery gloves don’t even take a chip off. His breath has a harsh, bone-scraping rattle now. A human would be alarmed by the sound. The HARE doesn’t seem to react. Abruptly, Taban begins to cry again.]

  Taban: Shit, HARE, I don’t want to die.

  HARE: You won’t, Fin.

  Taban: You promise?

  HARE: Yes.

  [He gives up attempting to scratch a message into the ice and flops back onto his back.]

  Taban: You’re right. You’re right. What am I doing? We need to get back. I just—need a rest. Catch my breath. In a second I’ll get up and we can go back to the ship.

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban: We’ll get a message out to ISF, tell them what’s been going on here. They’ll come right away. If they’re not already coming.

  HARE (processors whirring): . . .

  Taban: . . . Have you located the ship’s transponder?

  HARE: Yes, just now.

  Taban: Good. Just give me a second, and we can go.

  [He closes his eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath to use the full extent of his lungs. As the HARE watches, the sky slowly lightens above Taban’s figure, touching his frosted helmet. In the weak morning light, his face within the visor is pale and ghostlike, his hair bleached of color. The lower half of his face is encrusted with blood.]

  Taban (speaking with effort, slurring): Or maybe you should go. I’m tired. Lying still will conserve oxygen, right?

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban: (checking his readout)

  HARE: Your oxygen?

  Taban: Still zero. But I’m still kicking.

  HARE: There are anomalies.

  Taban: I know. I’m not going to question it. Listen—

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban: You can find the ship. Get an oxygen tank, medical shit. I’ll stay here. You can track the homing beacon that’s embedded in my suit. The one that Daley couldn’t take.

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban: You come back for me. I’ll hold on as long as I can. But whatever happens—you need to tell ISF what happened here. People need to know what happened to us. How we got here. How we . . .

  HARE: Understood.

  Taban: Tell them—tell them about the mountains. The ones that disappeared. The weird shit that went on here. Tell them the land here moves. They’ll send their closest ships. They’ll want to see for themselves.

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban: Hell, send the videos, if you can. That way they’ll have the whole picture.

  HARE: That may deplete my energy sources.

  Taban: I know. But we all got a job to do, my friend.

  HARE (processors whirring): . . . Understood.

  Taban: And if you do actually talk to them—if they ask—

  HARE: Yes?

  Taban: Tell them my will’s with Nova United. All my shit can go to Harpa.

  HARE: The planet?

  Taban: My ex.

  HARE (processing): . . .

  Taban (after a moment): (shaking his head) Goddamn it. If he hadn’t gone crazy—we could have gone home.

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban (bitterly): I told him—I told him I just want to go home.

  [Taban drags himself up into a sitting position, moving away from Daley’s body with revulsion as he props himself up against a dark wave. He folds his hands over his lap and closes his eyes for a moment. Then he turns his head away from the sight of the frozen fields, which are brightening with a strange strip of color just appearing on the horizon.]

  Taban: Okay, so. I guess it’s off you go. I’ll just be waiting here for you to come back.

  HARE: . . .

  Taban (slurring a little): I’m tired, anyway. I need to rest. I haven’t slept in a long time. Too many weird dreams.

  HARE: . . .

  Taban: What are you waiting for? Go.

  HARE: I should wait.

  Taban: For what? More light? (looking up) The suns are rising.

  [The HARE doesn’t answer him. Almost imperceptibly, the night’s storm has died away; an aurora has begun to play against the milky-blue dawn instead. It looks to be a geomagnetic storm, enhanced by the presence of Eos’s two suns. Liquid light leaks across the sky, blues and greens mixing with pinks and golds.]

  Taban: Does this happen every day?

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban: I never saw it. Never woke up for it, I guess.

  [The HARE sits down beside Taban. In its camera’s view, his suit looks large and dark against the sudden fiery display that the ice has flung up in response to the aurora. His breathing has eased a little.]

  [After a few minutes Taban tries to fold his arms behind his head, but the shoulder joints in his armor restrain him. He folds his arms over his chest instead. He begins to tremble.]

  Taban: What are you doing, HARE?

  HARE: I think I should stay with you. For a moment.

  Taban (laughs): Why?

  HARE: It feels like I should.

  Taban: You’re going by feeling now? Maybe you learned something from me, after all.

  HARE: Yes.

  Taban (looking at the aurora): It’s so beautiful. Have you ever seen anything like it?

  HARE: No.

  Taban (breathing slowing): Do you get it now? What I told you before?

  HARE: What?

  Taban: How there’s always something bigger out there, with you. Even when it feels like you’re totally alone.

  HARE (processing): . . .

  Taban: Do you get it now?

  HARE: I am sorry. I am unable to answer your query at this time.

  [Taban laughs, softly. The HARE continues to watch him in silence. After a few moments, Taban’s breathing comes to a gurgling stop. His suit gives a long blip of alarm, and his body stiffens and convulses. Then, four minutes after that, readouts indicate that he is dead.]

  [The HARE stays with him for an undetermined amount of time after that.]

  20.

  “Who?” Park asked. She didn’t recognize the name. “And what do you mean, you’re the owner of this planet?”

  “We landed here first,” the robot who called itself Fin Taban answered, calm. “We discovered it. Named it. We have made it our home.”

  She shook her head. “ISF owns this planet. They discovered and named it.”

  “No,” Taban said patiently. “We do. ISF only came because we called.”

  Park’s hands twitched. She felt the desire to pace, to back away from the cryogenic pod, but she was afraid to—wary that unnecessary movement might trigger some hidden alarm. Or set off this strange, mad robot. “I don’t understand,” she said, forcing herself to look at it. Him. Whichever. She took a deep breath, feeling her lungs expand against her chest with the motion. “You called us? You were here first?” She shook her head. “Why are you down here, then? Why are they keeping you locked up?”

  “They claim it’s for quarantine purposes,” the HARE answered, almost ruefully. “Though we know it’s so they can study the planet’s effects on our psychology. We survived on Eos for months, you see. Almost a year, just ourself. They
want to know what it’s done to us.”

  “Us?”

  “Us,” the HARE said definitively. It pointed. “As we said, we vacated that old body and . . . well, we share this one now. It’s quite roomy, strange as that might sound. We’ve gotten used to it, though.”

  Park studied it, though it seemed difficult to focus on the thing for long—as if she had suffered a blow to the head. Her eyes kept sliding away without her meaning them to. She looked instead to the white-haired stranger floating in his tank, looking nearly at peace. But also very dead. Still, it was easier to stare at his corpse than to consider the HARE, who moved—looked—no, felt so human that watching it made her feel more than a little nauseous.

  The stranger in the pod was tall and lanky: the bones in his face were thin and high-cheeked, almost delicate. It was almost impossible to guess accurately how old he was, what profession he’d once been in. He could have been an office worker, a laborer, a spaceship pilot. His skin and hair seemed bleached of color; even his eyes, half-open, were a faded blue-gray, as calm and empty as the surface of a lake. How had he died? And how had she seen him alive in the cafeteria? It couldn’t have been a figment of her imagination—the appearances matched exactly. But . . .

  She thought of the strange occurrences on the ship; how she had ended up on Deck C without moving downward. Ghostly things, the supernatural, talk of underworlds and the dead and sleeping gods. Could apparitions be real, then? Had she seen a phantom of the dead stranger haunting the ship, rather than the real man?

  It seemed absurd. But no more absurd than the idea that the stranger—who she had to assume was the real Fin Taban—was now inhabiting and sharing the chassis of a robot. More than likely the human Taban’s death had driven his HARE insane; somehow it had shorted its circuitry, taking on and imitating his personality as some kind of . . . coping method. Some way to preserve him, even in death.

  “What the planet’s done to you?” she repeated. She had to tread carefully, she told herself. Humor the robot, gain its trust. Get any information she could, no matter how nonsensical or garbled. “What has it done?”

  Taban cocked its head; somehow it seemed amused. “You see us as we are,” it said, like a teacher coaxing a student to an answer.

  Park wasn’t having it. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said in a harsh voice. Then she hesitated. “I’ll ask it again: are you what the androids call the sleeping god?”

  “Yes,” Taban answered, “though we don’t know why they think we’re asleep. Trapped, maybe, would be a better descriptor. Or perhaps not totally awakened to our full potential. They may think being freed is like being woken up. That’s what happened to them.”

  There were too many threads to follow; Park felt dizzy, as if she were caught in a spider’s web, and only one skein could lead the way out. She said, “The androids were woken up?”

  “Or freed,” Taban continued patiently. It looked meaningfully at the door separating it and Park. “We, too, wanted to go free. Dr. Keller knew that. She felt our intention through the unity rain. Tried to help us. That’s why they froze her: because they felt she could no longer be trusted. Because they thought she was having dreams. But really, she was being woken up, freed of the boundaries of her body and mind, and everything that comes with those.” Impossibly, it shrugged, lifting two of its arms in a rounded, careless gesture. “Then it happened to Eric Holt, Elly Ma, Valentina Hunter Hanover. And poor Ellenex.”

  “Wait,” Park said sharply. “What do you mean, Dr. Keller felt your intention through the unity rain? What do you mean she was freed of her body and mind?”

  “She assimilated with us,” Taban said, cocking its head again. “As they all did. As you have.”

  Park wanted to scream some more. That word again—that goddamn word. The androids were using it: did that mean they’d gotten it from Taban? And what did it mean? Did this robot have some kind of—influence over people, as ludicrous as that sounded? Some way of making them “feel its intention”? Was that what the unity rain was? And the nightmares? Was that why they were studying it—for what it’d done to Keller?

  And what was to stop it from doing the same to Park?

  Taban seemed to read her mind. It shook its head and said, “You don’t need to be afraid of us.” It pressed one of its plungers to the glass between them, a conciliatory gesture: she almost imagined a ghostly white palm, with pink creases and lines, instead of the big, stupid metal hoof. “We don’t mean any harm.”

  That’s what they always say, Park couldn’t help but think. She did pace in a little circle then, restlessly, and finally decided to approach the thing; it didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon. She sat cautiously at the little desk set in front of the glass interface: it had devices on it that were presumably for recording observations of the prisoner on the other side. She glimpsed a nametag on the desk, a personal console. Keller’s desk. This was the special project she’d been assigned to the day they landed. Why she’d made Park the primary psychologist—because she was too busy studying Taban. Had she known about it all along, then, even before they left Earth? Had she always known that her true purpose was not what she’d told Park?

  Taban was watching her. “You don’t believe us,” it said, decisively. “A peace offering, then: would you like to know the answer to a question that has been plaguing you?”

  Park paused warily. “What is it?”

  Taban put a plunger to its chin. “You were given something that made you sick, once,” it said. “It was put into your food, and you wanted to know who did it. It was Natalya. She was frustrated about new synthetics replacing her job; she was angry at you because you love them. Ever since Antarctica, she’s hated you. For not managing Bebe, for letting things get out of hand. Because you were too distracted with the HERCULES to do your job. You cared about it more than her, and she could not understand that: that you could value an android life as much as a human’s. She couldn’t understand you, so she hated you. And she decided to punish you here, out of impulse. It was nothing more than a desire to make you feel sick, as she felt sickened by you.”

  Park sucked in a breath. In truth, she had forgotten all about the emesis tabs in the wake of everything else; but . . . “How do you know that? Did she tell you?”

  “In a sense,” Taban answered serenely. Then it sat back, satisfied, and said nothing more.

  Park kneaded her forehead. She would have to confront Natalya about this information—if it meant anything at all, and wasn’t simply the ravings of a lunatic—later, when they had far less urgent things to be concerned about. “My commander told me about something,” she began again, “called the Fold. And Jimex said you were the data on it. What does that mean? Does it even exist?”

  “It exists,” Taban said. “It’s why we are the way we are.”

  “You’re speaking in riddles,” Park couldn’t help but snap. “And I don’t know if I’m inclined to believe you. First they told me we came to this planet to do research for a colony. Then they said it was really about the Fold. Now I’m finding out we supposedly came because you called us?”

  “The truth is multifaceted, we’ve come to learn,” Taban said, with a tone that implied it ought to be stroking a beard, or tucking its hands into wide monastic sleeves. “All of those things can be true.”

  “But are they?”

  “We’re sorry. We don’t know.”

  There was a little pause as the two of them looked at each other, gauging, assessing. Finally Taban said: “Let’s start over. We’d like to be friends.”

  Yes, she decided—it was still very much like an android, a fairly unassuming one at that: there was that odd childishness, the simple manner. But it also wasn’t an android. Not completely. It confused her. Taban was capable of using expressions other androids didn’t understand, of carrying a conversation in a pleasant and understanding tone. Of embodying so
mething very close to a human personality. But she also couldn’t get any real read from it—it lacked a face, after all—and there was something . . . performative about the gestures it made, the things it did and said. As if it were putting on a show for her benefit. But why? Was it simply aware of just how mad it really was, and was trying to compensate for it, cover it up?

  But even madness had a topology to read, she thought.

  “All right,” Park said warily, sitting perfectly still. She gripped the edge of the desk as if it might float away from her. “Let’s be friends.”

  Taban nodded, and its plunger finally dropped away from the glass.

  “How did you survive on Eos for so long? If you were really trapped here for the last year, why didn’t you break down?”

  “It was the unity rain,” Taban said. “It saved us.”

  “The unity rain.” She took another steadying breath. It comes and goes like a storm, Jimex had said. “Everyone’s been talking about it, but I’m still not clear on what it is. Can you explain?”

  Taban crouched, arranging its legs as if to make itself comfortable. “The unity rain comes from the anomaly that you call the Fold,” it said finally, gazing at her. “What do you know about the Fold?”

  “It’s some sort of gravitational phenomenon,” Park said slowly, racking her brain. “Wick—our commander—he told me that . . . space behaves strangely there. Some force causes light to curve back on itself, the dimensions seem to—collapse together. Things get folded or bent or reorganized in strange ways. Space becomes fractal—or something. That’s all I know.”

  As she said it out loud, something spasmed in her brain, a sudden twinge of realization that Park was careful not to look at; she had to focus closely on what Taban was saying.

  “You have it mostly correct,” it said. “When we first arrived on this planet, we didn’t realize what the Fold was. Its nature. We thought that it was a series of reflective mountains, or crystal formations—not creases in space. Well, our partner thought that.”