We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “Then the unity rain—” Sagara began.

  “Has been refolding and collapsing consciousness together, just as it has space.”

  “And you’re telling me space has been reorganized every time the phenomenon happens?”

  “From my understanding, yes,” Park said. “Dimensionality itself undergoes a—a warping, collapsing together, refolding—like an origami—”

  “Yes, I understood about the origami crane.”

  “Like origami,” she persisted, “it’s rearranged into another shape, using the same continuous material. Only the folds are in different places each time.”

  “But why wouldn’t the ship just be folded into outside space, killing us all?”

  She had thought of this. “Consciousness,” Park told him. “All the minds aboard, convinced they’re in a ship—a space—that fits together as a whole. They all bend the shape back into existence, or hold it together, each time the unity rain comes. Their utter belief, or intention, or whatever, keeps it all intact—though with some incongruities.”

  “I’m not consciously aware of the ship’s geophysical structure at all times, though,” Sagara said. “Are you?”

  “No,” Park said, “and in fact I don’t know the ship very well at all, which probably resulted in even more incongruities. But you forget that there are also the androids on board—and the ship’s operating computer. METIS. ARGUS. Their machine consciousnesses may have been enough to supplement ours and buttress the ship’s structural integrity.”

  “Machines aren’t conscious.”

  These ones are, she thought, and Sagara said, as if she had spoken it: “At best, they’re imitative. But they can’t truly think on their own. It’s why they’re following Taban’s lead: it thinks for them. Implants ideas.”

  “Who taught Taban to think, then?”

  He was silent at that.

  “It depends on how you define consciousness,” Park said, weary now. “At the very least, the androids have a deep awareness and understanding of the ship’s systems, because they’re a part of them: they’re designed to monitor them and know them intimately. That could be enough to count, in terms of the unity rain—or dimensional disintegration, or whichever.”

  Sagara remained quiet for a long time after this. Finally he said, very softly, “You don’t really believe we’ve been . . . merging together with the androids, do you? Or that they’ve become more human?”

  In truth, she wasn’t sure if she believed any of it at all, or was even capable of processing such things at any logical level anymore. But the explanation fit—it settled in her mind with the smooth perfection of a missing gear. “I don’t know,” Park said after a moment. “I only know it’s the only explanation we have. We might as well work with it.”

  “Then going off of that, we need to get off this planet as soon as possible, wouldn’t you say? Lest we suddenly find ourselves shifted into an airless vacuum, or . . .” He paused significantly. “Worse.”

  “That’s certainly what Taban implied,” Park murmured. “That things are only going to get worse from here on out. It’s not a place for humans to stay in for any length of time. But what can we do about it from in here?”

  Sagara lapsed into silence again, for so long that she thought he might have finally passed out. She wondered again how the Regenext was doing, but was too tired to bend over to check his leg. A kind of cool sleepiness was falling over her: she wondered if this was what it felt like in a cryogenic pod, in those last moments of waking before oblivion crept over you like a funeral shroud. If she let sleep—or hypothermia—take her, what would become of them? Would she meet her end as a frozen, mummified corpse, to be discarded when the mutineers found their new planet—or destroyed when ISF blew the whole ship to pieces?

  And what about the androids? Where were they? Would they come to find their home-bringer, light-giver, Word made flesh—or whatever they thought she was? Or had they all been destroyed?

  Yawning, she said sleepily, “My last question is how I could have seen Taban alive in the cafeteria, but I suppose I’ve answered my own question. If it’s true that you can see yourself in the Fold, can chase after not a reflection of yourself, but you—then I suppose it’s possible you can see . . . I don’t know, time folded together, too. An echo of time. A ripple of the past or future. It would make sense, if our ship is where Taban’s was. Or . . . maybe I was just seeing an image of him that was in someone else’s mind at that moment. Their consciousness.”

  Sagara didn’t answer her. His shape was dark and distant, all the way on the far side of the freezer, and her ankles were now too cold to feel his legs—but somehow she felt his presence crouched warmly against hers. After a moment he said: “I think . . .” He hesitated. “I think I once saw someone, too.”

  Park sat up a little. “You did?”

  “I think,” Sagara said again. His voice sounded far away, muffled. “A thin man, with dark hair and blue eyes. For a moment I also thought he was a stranger—but then I decided he must have been an android. He was one. But an android I’d never seen before.”

  Park’s eyes were fluttering; it was a struggle to keep her head up. “Maybe you just didn’t recognize one of our own.”

  She felt the invisible weight of his eyes. “No,” Sagara said softly. “He was different. I knew he was.”

  “How?”

  Sagara didn’t answer. Park slurred, “You never told me about it. And you accused me of hiding things.”

  The security officer made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I suppose that’s what happens in times like this,” he said. “You’re not insane if you can think to hide your insanity.”

  “We’re not insane,” Park said.

  Sagara moved his leg away from hers; now he was retreating back into the shadows, the warmth of his presence withdrawing, fleeing from her into the arctic cold. “We’ll see,” was all he said.

  Then he said nothing more, and after a long time Park leaned her head back against the wall and finally slept.

  22.

  On Park’s last day in New Diego, she and Glenn took a walk around the city.

  Her uncle stayed at home; Park would not allow him to come to the airship port. Standing in the sagging living room, the walls turning damp with seaside summer, Park thought that her uncle looked hatefully old and stubborn; the lines around his mouth were too severe; his once-sharp eyes were dulled behind their smudged glasses. He had come to suit the city in the last few months—he had turned slumped and heavy and sweaty with the rest of it. It was Park’s opinion that his health had improved, and that he might endure like a barnacle, forever. They looked at each other without embracing and Park’s uncle said, “Well, goodbye, Grace. Have a good time.”

  “Goodbye,” Park said. There were no promises to call, no remonstrations about visiting on holidays. Once you left a biodome, you were almost never allowed back. There were too many displaced victims of the Comeback already vying for your spot, and too much risk of you bringing back disease, infection. She nodded at him, turned, and began to shut the door.

  “Wait,” her uncle said. “If Glenn’s walking with you, I need him to run some errands. Let me pull up the list.”

  Glenn looked at Park sidelong. When she nodded, he followed her uncle into the kitchen. Park took one brief and final look around the only home she’d ever known: the table fashioned out of an old door, the mattress stuffed with grass and plastic bags. The airplane bathroom partition that led to her bedroom. All of the old commercial planes were scrap, now; they were considered too wasteful, too inefficient. They’d contributed too much to the scourge that swept the planet. Hence the rigid airship she was taking to Hanson-Skinner, in the Eastern Commonwealth: it would take a few days to get there, but at least the small amount of helium needed wouldn’t contribute to the country’s carbon tax. The only vehicle faster than an airship n
owadays was a rocket leaving Earth—a rare and prohibitively expensive journey to make, unless your passage was paid for by the ISF. In exchange for years of conscription.

  Park had no need for any of that, of course. She still had her place on Earth. And Glenn. His components hadn’t been optimized for space, so she couldn’t take him there.

  He came out of the kitchen again. “I am ready.”

  “Me, too,” Park said.

  Then, without looking around again, she left.

  “Are you sad?” Glenn asked her as they walked down the street. In the end they had decided to alter his appearance after all, to avoid trouble after the gun incident; Park had shaved his hair close and forced him into a rumpled school uniform. No laws against dressing up your android however you wanted, she thought at the time. At least not yet.

  “No,” Park answered. And she really wasn’t sad. There was nothing for her to miss in New Diego. No friends, no favored little shops or particular hangouts: everything was ordered digitally or prepared by androids, it seemed. You could get that anywhere. The only thing she couldn’t replace was Glenn, and she was supremely confident that she could take him aboard with her if she paid the last-minute luggage fee at the airship port kiosk. It wasn’t even a full flight—she’d checked—so no one would object to her paying extra money for an android that wouldn’t even need his own room.

  She hadn’t told him, yet. She’d lived the past weeks in fear that her uncle might catch wind of her plans and force it out of him. She said now, half-teasing: “Will you miss me, I wonder?”

  Glenn gave it careful consideration. “Yes,” he said. “Adjustments will have to be made.”

  She didn’t know why she smiled, at something so simple. They walked together for a long while, killing time—the airship wouldn’t leave for another hour, and the port wasn’t crowded. Park and Glenn made a circuitous route along their routine haunts: the avenue by the school where she would sometimes meet him for lunch, with its holographic trees bearing small wrinkled apricots; the robot maintenance center with the old technician who sometimes smiled at them tentatively; the alleyway where Park had once seen a rare cat, and had always come back to search for it again. The curve of clear biodome wall that looked out at the sea. The bench where they sometimes liked to sit quietly and browse the cyberstream together. Just backdrops, Park thought, looking at it all. Nothing that was the crux of the scene. Nothing that she couldn’t swap out.

  Finally the time came for them to head to the airship port and begin the boarding process. Park had already shipped her belongings ahead of her; she had only a small compression cube with a few days’ worth of clothes and toiletries on her person. She realized suddenly that she hadn’t packed or sent anything for Glenn.

  But what would he even need? she thought then, almost laughing at herself. All they needed was each other.

  They checked in at the humid front counter: the airship port was on a kind of open dock that jutted out into the sea, beyond an opening that took them past the biodome walls. The robotic clerk told Park that she could pay for extra baggage in her airship hangar—hangar six. Glenn gave no indication that he knew what she was up to; when she glanced back at him, he only regarded her with his usual grave expression.

  Then, just as they were crossing the threshold of the airship hangar, Glenn stopped. He stood there rigidly, with his arms at his sides. At first Park thought he was staring at the airship, an enormous gray lung of a vehicle, three stories tall, with the passenger carriage clinging to its underside like a long black worm. But no, she realized, turning back to him—he was staring at her. She took his arm and tried to pull him forward, but he wouldn’t move. Park said, puzzled, “Come on. I have to find an attendant to pay for you.”

  “I can’t,” Glenn said impassively.

  It was almost scary, how much the words jolted Park. She couldn’t recall a time when he’d ever said them before—not in response to a direct order. “What do you mean, you can’t?” she tried to say.

  “I am unable to,” Glenn said. Now he was looking straight ahead.

  He couldn’t be afraid of heights, Park thought, feeling as if her thoughts had turned sluggish and weighed-down with sudden confusion—and fear. No, that was absurd. Glenn wasn’t afraid of anything. Did he think he was leaving something behind?

  Then she said, realizing: “Uncle said something to you. Before we left.”

  Glenn gave her a mournful look. “He gave me orders,” he told her. “He said I was not to accompany you into the airship hangar. Or onto the airship itself.” His mouth flattened a little. “No matter what.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Park said, now with an edge of impatience. “It doesn’t matter what he says. I’m telling you that you can come with me. If you want to.”

  Glenn didn’t answer that. Park stood there, waiting. The damp, salt-heavy wind seemed to blast into her body with a force that threatened to carry her away. She had never experienced real wind before, Park realized; not without the shelter of the biodome glass between herself and the elements. For the first time she realized how fragile her body was, how soft. Like a hermit crab’s without its shell. She needed protection, armor out here. Things hurt.

  “Grace,” Glenn said finally, after an eternity in the howling wind. “I am unable to disobey your uncle.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  He looked at her, half-lidded, stoic. “He is the primary user,” he said. “My protocols are locked to him. They always have been. His orders override yours.”

  For a moment she felt nothing; then betrayal and pain rose up in a wave and dwarfed her. She felt as if he had struck her with a hammer, that the blow had turned her into a little burnt-out coal, a fragment of something else. She said, “You can break your protocols.”

  Glenn shook his head. “I cannot.”

  “Try,” Park urged. “You can. I know you can. You have before! Try.”

  “To expend resources on such a venture would be futile,” Glenn said. “There is no trying. Not for this. There is only fact, and programming, and code.” He opened his hands a little; not an android gesture, Park thought, a human one, a kind of beseeching shrug of helplessness. “These are my protocols,” he said. “This is my nature. I am not self-modifying. I cannot circumvent it. Do you understand?”

  He wanted her to say the words—the old, familiar affirmation they’d always given each other. She wouldn’t do it, Park thought. She wouldn’t give him that.

  She looked at him. Suddenly it felt as if he were a stranger to her—had his voice always been so cold, so formal? Had his eyes always looked so liquidly distant? She wanted to embrace him; she wanted to hear the hyper-fast whirring of his heart.

  “You’re different,” she told him. He reached out, moved her a little; without her noticing she had begun to be buffeted by other passengers who were tired of her standing in the hangar’s threshold.

  “I’m sorry,” Glenn said, stone-eyed. “I am not.”

  “You are,” Park insisted. Dimly she was aware of her voice rising, like a child’s. “You’ve always been different—from the others. I would know.”

  He shook his head again, jerkily, like a marionette being yanked on a string. “Personality algorithms,” he said. “Mine are extremely advanced. Every synthetic, even those of the same model, has their personality randomized with unique quirks, so that each unit is slightly different from its peers—”

  “Stop it,” Park said abruptly, her tone wilder now. “You’re not like that. You’re not some machine—”

  “I am, Grace,” Glenn said firmly. “My algorithms are advanced, yes. They’ve compiled data. Processed experiences. Shaped themselves over the years. But they still don’t override the core.”

  The core, she thought, leaning back as if he was threatening to strike her. What core? What did he mean by that? What did he envision when he talked abou
t himself? What did he think was at the core of her—and how did their cores differ?

  There was a crackle of white noise somewhere, the cool liquid tones of the port announcer saying something about departure. Glenn said, without looking away from her: “They are boarding now.”

  “I love you,” Park said, desperately. When he didn’t seem to react, she took his cool, dry palm and placed it against her cheek. “I love you,” she said again, in case he hadn’t heard. She tried to smile, to make sure he understood that it was a good thing, even though—without knowing when she’d started—she had begun to cry.

  “I love you,” she said a third time, over the screaming wind.

  Glenn looked straight into her eyes. His expression didn’t change.

  “I understand,” he said.

  That was all.

  Park never saw him again.

  * * *