We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “Partner?” Park echoed—and then realized it. The dead man in the other room.

  “Hap Daley,” Taban said, as if that would mean anything to her. It made a sad, regretful gesture; it sighed. “He was our pilot.”

  “Go on.”

  “We used to go looking for them, these formations,” the robot continued. “But they would always disappear: we thought our mind was playing tricks on us. But in actuality we were passing through the formations, the Fold, like a mirage. Passageways through space. But we didn’t realize the truth for a long time, and Daley spent weeks searching for the mountains again. And again. He thought they were physical things that could be mined.”

  It cocked its head at her. “It wasn’t until we’d been assimilated that we were able to go and study them for ourselves. You were partly right. The Fold is an anomaly where something—we don’t know what—causes particles to behave strangely. Particles born in a single instant, then split in that same instant, usually exist in different dimensions, you see; but in the Fold, their longing to be whole again is so strong that they collapse the dimensions between them. The dimensions subsequently merge into one, or are bent into unrecognizable shapes.”

  “I . . . see,” Park said hesitantly, feeling lost. She thought again of what Wick had told her: what would happen if figures on a 2D, flat piece of paper found their plane of existence rolled into a tube. Or bent into an origami crane. How incomprehensible that would look to the figures that had always been flat.

  Taban plowed on. “But that anomalous behavior isn’t restricted to the area you call the Fold alone. Sometimes it causes planet-wide ripples—quantum events—like storms, where whatever is causing particles to behave oddly in the Fold also surges out across Eos in a wave. A ripple effect, all across the planet. This is what we call the unity rain.”

  Park kneaded her temples. “So you’re saying—what happens in the Fold also happens elsewhere? The dimensions fold together?”

  Taban nodded. “For a temporary time, yes,” it said. “It might even be affecting the space around the planet: our ship might have fallen through one such fold. We were flying outside of Vier and suddenly found ourselves here.” It paused. “And once we were here, it happened to our ship, the Wyvern, too. And the land around our ship. The terrain . . . changed. Or shifted around us.”

  “Then—our ship has been affected, too?”

  “Yes,” Taban said. Now it shifted, looking around at the deep chamber outside of its cell, the gunmetal veins crowding around them. “Though we think the unity rain comes in cycles, or seasons. At the beginning of a season, the event is infrequent and its effects are almost imperceptible. As time goes on, it grows in frequency and intensity, though when it activates seems to be erratic. The effect grows much stronger over time, merging things together until the event seems to exhaust itself, and the season is over for a time.” It looked back at her. “Our ship—Daley and us—arrived toward the end of the season, when the unity rain was at its strongest. That’s when it took us. It drove Daley mad, and assimilated us. Taban and HARE, HARE and Taban.”

  “And us?” Park asked, her throat now dry. “My crew? When in the season did the Deucalion arrive?”

  “At the beginning,” Taban answered. It scratched the back of its head with a plunger. “Though we are fast approaching the end. You’ve felt the growing effects already.”

  Park closed her eyes, despite the sudden great rising storm in her heart. It all makes sense, she thought. It was why the hallways were shifting, bending and straightening impossibly; it was why she was continually getting lost. Why she and Hunter had been tossed around impossibly, without tampering or sabotage, like mice being shaken inside a cardboard box. The Fold was changing the dimensions of the ship. The unity rain was hitting us then.

  “But I don’t understand,” Park said, opening her eyes again. “This unity rain—if what you’re saying is really true, I see how it could affect the physical structure of this place.” She remembered how Wick said Boone had spent some time chasing a reflection of himself in the Fold—or his actual self, reflected back on him by a curvature in spacetime. “It folds space, so obviously—the space in our ship was folded, rearranged. But what does that have to do with the nightmares? Or Keller and Holt acting strangely? How could it?”

  “The unity rain merges dimensions together in strange ways,” Taban answered. “And space is not the only dimension. So when the unity rain comes, yes, it collapses and refolds it, causing spatial deformities. But consciousness is a dimension, too—a higher one than space and time, defining and shaping both. And it’s affected by the unity rain as well.”

  Park had to sit there, her brain sparking like a firecracker. What? The unity rain folds consciousness together? It sounded ridiculous, some kind of mystical, spiritual nonsense dogmatized by a mad robot living out on the ice, imagining itself to be some kind of sage or guru. She still had the distinct feeling they were just barely missing each other’s meanings, like birds grazing wingtips in the clouds. Taban could not be trusted—it could not be talking sense.

  But fringe scientists had long posed that same theory, hadn’t they? That consciousness—awareness, thought—was its own invisible force, unobservable, unprovable, but present all the same? Weren’t there molecules that only responded and changed when observed by a living creature; vibrations of waves and particles that manifested only when beheld by a human observer? And morphogenetic fields, morphic resonances—those ideas had been around for centuries. They posited that awareness and consciousness could be shared, could exist everywhere and connect everything and were not just confined to the human body. Like time and space. People somehow knew when they were being watched by hidden observers, sensed when someone unseen had ill intentions toward them, when it should have been impossible to know. Water molecules changed their structure around people feeling anger; plants grew better when coaxed with positive reinforcement. Twins separated by thousands of miles felt a physical sensation when their counterparts died.

  “You mean to say our consciousnesses are being merged together,” Park said. Her voice sounded very faint to her own ears. “Like space. They’re being refolded—every time the unity rain happens?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what does that mean?” But even as she said it, she knew; she sat back sharply in her seat, as if winded. The nightmares. That’s how they’re spreading. If everyone is sharing consciousnesses, then they’re sharing dreams. That’s how it’s being transmitted from person to person.

  “Shit,” she said aloud.

  Taban gave her a curious look, but Park’s thoughts were whirring fast now, a film reel spinning almost too quickly for her to comprehend. She had to speak aloud or lose the thread of the thing entirely.

  “Holt had his nightmare the day we landed,” she said. “It must have spread outward from him. But—he’s been frozen. Whatever he’s experiencing or dreaming shouldn’t be affecting anyone else by now, since he’s no longer—conscious. Why is it still able to spread? Is it some kind of unstoppable echo effect? A chain reaction?” Or do the frozen people still dream?

  But Taban was shaking its head. “You’re thinking of it wrong,” it answered. “As if there was one causal point that seeded the nightmare, and everything thereafter toppled like dominoes. But it isn’t a linear effect with one origin point. It’s an ongoing environmental effect.”

  “Then what in the environment is causing it?” Park demanded. “One of the crewmembers must be doing it to everyone else, if our consciousnesses are being shared—”

  “But you’re only thinking of human consciousness,” Taban interrupted again. “Machine consciousness exists, too. Artificial intelligence is still intelligence.”

  The world lurched. Park felt as if she were on a seaward ship, felt as if the floor was swaying beneath her; she put a hand on Keller’s desk to steady herself. What the hell is he talking about?
was her first thought.

  But even as she thought it, she remembered then the uncanny sensations she’d felt, fleeing down the corridors: the acute feeling of being watched by a million invisible eyes. An alien intelligence regarding her. Digesting her. ARGUS. METIS. No. Could it be? Had her awareness—her consciousness, her mind—actually melded together with the ship’s at some point?

  Her gorge rose inexplicably, but Park suppressed it. “The androids,” she said, speaking rapidly. “You’re talking about the androids?”

  Taban cocked his head to the side, as if listening to some faraway song. Then he nodded. “Yes.”

  Park wanted to put her head in her hands, but she was afraid to look away from Taban: she was afraid he might vanish like some sort of apparition. She felt her eyeballs staring like a dead woman’s. “You have to explain,” she said.

  “In the unity rain, similar things tend to merge together with less catastrophic effect,” Taban said, as if he were reviewing some elementary textbook lesson. “And it affects the most susceptible things first. A human and a synthetic’s consciousnesses are similar, so they can merge during the event. But they are not exactly the same—in fact they are fundamentally different—so the experience of assimilating creates certain effects. In some humans, these are the nightmares: their brains are unable to process the experience.”

  All of the victims were acting emotionless, Park thought, her head swaying. They were all robotic, devoid of affect. Holt, Hunter. And their nightmares were about missing their tongues, not being able to move or breathe—not being in control of their own bodies.

  “They were experiencing what it’s like to be an android,” she said, scarcely breathing.

  Taban nodded, unfazed by her epiphany. “Yes. The Fold—no, the unity rain—merged the human crewmembers’ consciousnesses with that of the synthetics, forcing them to experience a synthetic’s perspective—a machine’s thoughts and experiences. But the human brain isn’t able to process something like that, not right away. Hence the nightmares, as you call them. Which were really quantum-cognitive episodes.”

  “And the androids—”

  “—have been experiencing what it’s like to be human,” Taban finished. “As we said. The unity rain woke them up.”

  Park stared at him. Her blood was thundering. “And you?” she asked. Her voice sounded loud and foreign to her own ears. “Who have you been—folded into? Who did you merge with? Am I talking to Taban—or a machine that woke up to imitate him when the true one died?”

  “Both,” Taban said, unmoved. “We are both. We are merged. We are assimilated. We have achieved unity.”

  She wanted to back away from him, wanted to scream. Her hands gripped the desk edge so that her knuckles turned white. Was this what was going to happen to everybody, the longer they stayed on this planet? Was this what had happened to Keller, to Holt, to Ma? Some of them must have merged with Taban’s consciousness, or his “intention,” as he called it: that was why he’d said Keller tried to help him, because his consciousness and desire to leave had invaded her dreams. Her mind. And Holt, trying to let him out of the utility rooms when he was shot by Boone; and Hunter, perhaps trying to go for the controls that could release him. But her mind had been emptied of the knowledge of how to do so—it might have been dumped into his brain at that moment, as his had been folded into hers. They’d all been assimilated, merged together. All with one goal, one singular desire.

  To let Taban out.

  And now Keller and the rest were frozen, and Ellenex was destroyed. That assimilation, at least—the reckless desire to set Taban free, seeded into her by the unity rain—had led to her death.

  “We have to leave,” Park said. “If the unity rain is only going to get stronger from here on out—”

  “Yes, the deformations will grow quite extreme,” Taban said serenely. “There’s no telling what might happen.”

  Could the effects be reversed? she wondered with horror. Or had it already happened past the point of no return? What about Park’s own thoughts? Were they really still her own? How could she know?

  “I never had the nightmares,” she said, faintly.

  “You dreamed of other things,” Taban said. “And gifted them to the synthetics, who learned from them. Learned from you, we should say.”

  She shuddered. “But why didn’t I have nightmares at all?”

  “The nightmares are the result of extreme dissonance,” he told her. “The inability of the human brain to comprehend the synthetic’s, their mind’s rejection of the synthetic experience. But similar things merge with greater ease, with less resistance and struggle—and you are more similar to a synthetic than the rest. You have a greater affinity to them than most other humans. Your mind is already a little part machine.”

  What? Park thought dumbly. What?

  Taban laughed, a little sadly. “You have always tried to understand them, Park. Ever since you were young.”

  She sat back from him, reeling. Then Taban looked at something behind her and pointed. “Warning,” he said.

  Park half-turned.

  Something smashed against the side of her face and shattered.

  Park felt a flash of precognition just before the impact, but wasn’t able to see who was standing behind her: all she saw was the explosion of glass, starbursts of pain erupting in her eyes. For a moment she thought she’d gone blind. She fell—though something braced her against the pain so that it was dull and muted, as if she had been wearing a padded helmet. Still, when she landed on the ground, she felt the trickle of something warm slipping down her neck.

  Park looked up, blinking through the blood. Her head vibrated as if it were a struck gong. Natalya was standing over her, grim, the blue light of the room casting her face in shadow so that her eyes were as dark and empty as a funeral mask’s. She was holding a broken glass beaker in her hand; when she saw that Park was still conscious, she reversed the remaining sliver in her grip so that it became a knife.

  Park stared at her. There was a dim roaring in her ears, and she did not know if it was from the muted pain of the blow—if she’d suffered a brain injury—or if something else was happening. If the unity rain had come.

  Taban was speaking to Natalya through the wall of his cell, his voice low and urgent-sounding, but Park couldn’t make out his words. She said, half-slurring: “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t move,” Natalya answered, cold. She looked at Park as if she didn’t recognize her. “I will kill you if you move.”

  “This isn’t necessary,” Taban was saying. “Please, there’s no need for violence—”

  She pointed the glass shard at him. “Shut up.” Then, to Park: “What the fuck are you even doing down here? Where’s Boone?”

  Park didn’t answer her. Instead she touched the back of her head—her fingers came away damp and red—and tried to piece a thought together. Natalya’s trying to kill me. Why?

  Natalya saw her thinking and lunged. Taban made another warning sound, but this time Park was ready; suddenly she felt filled with some swift, savage power, and she rolled to the side, seizing the metal legs of the desk behind her. She heaved with all her might, and the whole thing came tipping down onto Natalya, console and all. Park scrambled to her feet as the surveyor screamed—Taban yelled something about letting him out—but she didn’t look back. She had to get out of there, away from Natalya, out of the secret chamber where no one could hear or find her. She needed to find help: Fulbreech—Sagara—hell, even Boone. She ran for the gravity chute just as she heard Natalya rolling to her feet, breathing hard and cursing. Her mind was moving too fast for her to catch her own thoughts. Weapon—I need a weapon—where are the fucking weapons on this ship?

  She could not stop to consider why her own crewmate was attacking her. Natalya had always hated Park, that much was clear; maybe she had become unhinged, her brain pried loose b
y the unity rain. Or maybe it was something she’d been plotting all along, and she was using the cover of recent events to stage Park’s murder.

  Maybe she had already done that with Wick.

  Sagara has weapons, she thought as she toppled into the gravity chute and slammed her fist into the panel that would activate it. And Boone. She needed to get to them.

  The gravity chute activated in a flare of light and sent her body bulleting upwards. She heard Natalya give a scream of fury somewhere below her: two people couldn’t use the chute at once. That gave Park maybe a sixty-second lead. And Natalya was in much better shape than she was.

  She tumbled out of the utility room and felt arms catch at her. Park shouted, swinging wildly—but then she saw the pair of lambent gray eyes and realized that Jimex was holding her. He’d still been standing there, waiting for her to come back up—but why hadn’t he stopped Natalya from going down? Behind him, the other robots were watching silently.

  “Danger,” Park blurted, over the desperate hammering of her heart. “Natalya—”

  “We know,” Jimex said. “We tried to stop her—but we still have to obey direct orders. Our protocols still bind us.”

  “You need to run,” Dylanex added.

  “I’ve got to find Sagara and the others—”

  “Captain Sagara is in the bridge,” Jimex said. He gave Park a firm push. “Please run.”

  She hesitated for just the barest second—a precious second, considering the circumstances. She did not want them to come to harm. But there were a dozen of them, and only one of Natalya—and one android alone was ten times stronger than a human.

  “Be careful,” she said to them. “I’ll—I’ll come back for you.”

  Unfathomably, Jimex smiled. “We know,” he said. “You are one of us now.”

  She left them and ran. Down the empty corridors, up the narrow chutes, screaming for help at the top of her lungs all along the way. No one answered her—there were only, what, five others left on the three-deck ship?—but somehow it felt as if the Deucalion itself was helping her, guiding her along by some magnetic force, directing her down hallways she felt would close up behind her like a mouth to seal Natalya off. Irrational, of course, and absurd—but she knew she would get to the bridge before the surveyor.