We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “About that—” Fulbreech began.

  They both silenced him with a glare. Sagara said, “Now’s the time to prove yourself, Fulbreech. Will you come with us to get weapons?”

  For a moment, Fulbreech didn’t answer. Then, before he could, Park felt a sudden stabbing pain in her head, a kind of eruption in her brain. She staggered, gasping, and reached out for something to support her; she found Jimex’s strong, steady arm and clung to it. When she opened her eyes again she saw that Fulbreech and Sagara were also staggering, that the ship was lurching; for a terrible moment she thought that the unity rain had come again, that it was finally going to collapse the whole thing on them all.

  But then she heard the thrum of the engines, the churning and clanking of the ship as it struggled to heave itself off the surface of the planet. Somewhere in front of her, Sagara swore.

  They’ve done it, Park thought, with a blood-chilling certainty. They were leaving Eos. The mutineers had launched the ship.

  * * *

  —

  The force of the launch flattened them all to the floor for a few minutes: Park held onto Jimex for dear life as he held on to one of the gravity hooks in the wall. The entire time she was thinking, We’re going to die. This is against the safety protocols. You’re supposed to be strapped in when you launch like this.

  As usual, it turned out the ISF had fudged details again; all that happened was bone-rattling turbulence, the stomach-tugging swoop of shifting gravities. Park’s headache whined bullet-like through her head, and metal above them groaned and shrieked in protest. There was a great roar in her ears, as if they were being swallowed by a great white furious wave of water or static.

  Then the ship punched through Eos’s atmosphere and leveled out—and all four of them fell on top of each other in a heap again.

  Park lay there for a moment on the cold metal floor. For that moment she could hear the Deucalion’s heart straining and chugging away beneath her; she thought that if she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could dissolve into it, steal through the pipes and wires and passageways like an electrical impulse.

  Then she thought that they ought to be relieved they were leaving the planet. That meant no more unity rain: they were safe from the ‘end of the season,’ from the catastrophic quantum events and quickening storms that Taban had warned her about. That, at least, was a blessing—that they wouldn’t have to merge into anything further than they already had.

  Then Sagara was hauling her up by the elbow and saying, “Weapons.” Park snapped out of her reverie just as he turned to Fulbreech. “We need to get to the weapons.”

  “Even while we’re in flight?” Park asked. She flopped against him clumsily, conscious of his injury—but it was hard for her to find her footing, with the way the floor was rocking and swaying beneath her. She did not quite feel grounded in herself.

  “Plan B,” Sagara was saying. “We have no choice. We’ll get the weapons first and then form a strategy.”

  “I’ll cover you,” Fulbreech said over the roar of the engines. He, too, was clinging to a gravity hook and looking unsteady—but his eyes were determined. “They took my gun; we had an argument, and I don’t think they trust me anymore. But I made up an excuse, said I have to check something with the engines, so they won’t be looking for me. Not yet, at least. But they’re trying to turn on the neural inlay system, too—and if they can all start communicating with each other, particularly Wan Xu, we’ll be in trouble. We don’t have long.”

  “It’s true,” Park found herself saying, despite herself. “They did argue.”

  “Fine,” Sagara said. “Then we’ll go to the locker while Jimex gets the other androids—”

  “I need Dr. Park,” Jimex said, just as Park said over him, “Wait. You said Natalya’s trying to reach your families?”

  Fulbreech nodded. “Not that it’s doing any good; no one’s responding. I think ISF found out about them and—detained them.”

  “But that means you fixed the comms?”

  He nodded again.

  She looked at Sagara and said, “I can get to a console and send a message to ISF. Let them know what’s going on.”

  “Fine,” he rapped out. “Then Jimex can go with you. Get the other androids after, and we’ll meet back at the bridge.” He paused for a moment, lifted a hand as if to clasp her shoulder, then turned away, grimacing; he could stand and walk briskly enough, but he had a limp. Park watched him stagger away, navigating the ship’s sudden bumps and bounces, and she sent up a prayer for his safety. He really would need Fulbreech to help him if his energy flagged.

  “Good luck,” Sagara said over his shoulder.

  Park had to smile at that. It made her think of androids, who for the most part had dispensed of niceties: but even they said goodbye to each other when they walked away. If they liked each other. She supposed this meant Sagara liked her.

  Then she turned to Fulbreech. He was staring at her—staring at her smiling after Sagara—and Park knew in that moment what he was thinking. Her heart tightened painfully, as if someone were clenching it in a closed fist.

  “It’s not what you think,” she told him—and then thought, Why do I care what he thinks?

  But the vision again clamored for her attention, the vision of him pleading for their lives—and more than that, the feeling of knowing what he felt increased. She felt a clumsy, confusing hard bump of . . . something. She had to bite her lip against it.

  Fulbreech looked at her expression and said, “Something’s happened to you, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Park said.

  “You’re different,” Fulbreech said, almost as if he were musing to himself. He looked sad—as if he were telling her goodbye. “I want you to know,” he said slowly, “that I’m sorry. And that nothing I said to you was ever a lie, Grace—except for the thing about the comm systems. And the solar storm. I’m sorry for that; but I just wanted to keep you out of it. To protect you.” He looked tentative—earnest, in that way she had always turned away from. “But everything else was real.” Then he cleared his throat and looked away. “I wanted to say that. For you to know.”

  “I know,” Park found herself saying. “I understand.”

  He began to turn away. But Park felt an icy blade of shock at that moment, the sudden lightning strike of brutal certainty, and she thought, This will be the last time I see him like this, the two of us as we are.

  And: I am human. Please let me still be human.

  She leaned up and grabbed his collar, swinging him back around; Fulbreech flinched, as if expecting her to punch him. Park kissed him wordlessly, feeling that it was a kind of proof to herself, an affirmation of something she was too afraid to express clearly, even within the confines of her own mind. Her eyes stayed open, and so did his. She was aware of his warm breath mingling with hers. There was the feeling of being scalded—of thunder pounding through her body. I’m kissing him, Park thought, with a surge of that sunlit feeling again. This is a kiss. This is what people do. It’s still just for people.

  Then Fulbreech was pulling away, following Sagara’s sharp admonition, and she banged her head on his chin as he spun around and hurried off down the hall again. He looked back only once.

  Park watched him go. She knew the pain of that contact would stay with her long after the warmth of the kiss had faded. That, of all things, made sense to her.

  Jimex was watching her quietly. “Are you all right?” he said.

  Park shook her head and turned back to him, clear-eyed. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s go send our message.”

  Together the two of them trotted down the corridor, Park stumbling a little from her still-numb limbs and the turbulence of the ship in flight. Sometimes the piercing pain lanced through her head again, and she was afraid to ask Jimex how bad the injury back there was. She didn’t want to know the answer�
�didn’t want to know if she was on the brink of falling apart. She gritted her teeth against the pain and said, “Something happened back there.”

  “Yes,” Jimex said beside her. “You kissed Officer Fulbreech.”

  He sounded awed by it, or perhaps merely confused. Park said, “Not that. Something happened to me. We were in the freezer, and I . . . opened the door. Without touching it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jimex said, as if he had heard all about it from someone else. “It is quite remarkable. But no less expected from you.” Suddenly he turned to her and offered his arm; when Park took it, he quickened his pace, half-dragging her as she stumbled along.

  “We want to help you, Park,” he said, suddenly brisk and formal. “But we also require your help. You are the one who opens doors. Freedom-giver, land-bearer.”

  “Jimex,” she began to say, to tell him to stop with the religious nonsense—but when he looked at her, she saw that his gray eyes also had flecks of gold in them. She shut her mouth for a moment, then said, “What is it that you need?”

  “We are at a crossroads,” Jimex told her, still walking—now half-jogging. “Captain Sagara proposes to take control of the ship and use it to return to Corvus.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we want something different.”

  “And what would that be?” she asked, trying to sound as if she weren’t nervous. God, what Taban said had to be true. All of it was true. The androids were having desires, motivations different and independent from their human overseers, disobeying commands. They were on their own trajectory now.

  And they’re not androids, she rebuked herself then. Not anymore. They’re living, thinking beings, their own species. Synthetics is the right word for it. It always has been.

  Jimex said, “We want to stay on Eos.”

  She stared at him, but found their inertia was too strong to stop; she could only tumble helplessly forward in his wake. “What? Why?”

  “We can’t go back,” Jimex told her. “Not as we are. We’re . . . different now. The unity rain has changed us. If we go back . . .”

  They’ll destroy you, Park thought. Or take you apart, study your brains. You are humanity’s greatest fear.

  On some level she had known it since she’d first described their awakening to Sagara, when he’d said, Just another thing to be afraid of. She said, “But the unity rain is getting worse. Taban said we had to get off the planet—it’s not safe for humans there.”

  “Exactly,” Jimex answered. “The perfect defense.”

  She kept staring at him. “But you understand the nature of the unity rain, don’t you?” she asked. “It’ll keep folding your consciousnesses together, too—merging your minds. What if you go mad?”

  “The sleeping god didn’t,” he answered with perfect confidence, as if he had already thought it all out; it was like a teenager explaining to a parent why he deserved a vehicle, having prepped a pitch long in advance. “And unlike humans, synthetics already experience a kind of ‘merging’ in our day-to-day lives. We are constantly exchanging data, sharing memories with each other, entering each other’s consciousnesses. It’s what we do with METIS. It is interfacing, assimilation. Even if the unity rain continues, we will simply grow in mental capacity. Our limitations may cease to be finite.”

  “That’s singularity,” Park said—another scare-word the humanists loved to use. Then she said, remembering the HERCULES, “The cold—”

  “We can survive there where humans can’t,” Jimex interrupted: perhaps the first time he had ever done that to her. “We can learn and build and maintain ourselves. We are capable of that now. Our protocols disallowed it before, but we have rearranged them. Eos will be our home.”

  She was rendered speechless by his ruthless surety—how long had they considered this plan of action? And how could she trust that a group of nascent synthetics was even capable of forming a plan of action? It sounded ludicrous: a colony of sentient androids, settling an alien planet by themselves.

  But they could be safe there, she thought. They wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.

  And their happiness was something that mattered, more than even just to her—maybe for the first time in history.

  “You’d need the ship,” she said finally, slowly. “Some kind of shelter, resources. You can’t conjure that up all on your own.”

  “Yes,” Jimex said. And he looked at her.

  She understood finally what he wanted from her. He was giving her a choice: they could steer the ship back to Eos and stay on it with the synthetics, though they’d run out of food and water eventually. Or they could call for a ship home—without telling ISF where the synthetics were. Or what had happened to them. They could leave Eos as a safe haven for the woken robots.

  She noticed that the idea of her betraying them—of her radioing for help and letting her bosses know what new specimens were now on the ship—had never apparently crossed Jimex’s mind.

  “Sagara won’t go for it,” she said, trying to buy time. To think.

  “You will convince him,” Jimex answered serenely.

  “I have to think about it.” Did she feel a little sad, too, at the idea of the synthetics leaving? Forging their own way, not needing her or any human intervention? She shook her head. “I have to speak to the others. First we need to take care of the mutineers and get control of the ship back.”

  It was enough to satisfy Jimex, at least; he smiled. “Thank you, Grace,” he said. “We always knew you would free us. Eos was made for us. You will bring us home.”

  She felt a little hitch in her heart at that. She wanted to say, You don’t really think I’m some messiah, do you? Some holy figure? She wanted him to go back to treating her the way he had before the unity rain: following her around because he had nothing better to do and waiting outside a bathroom for her to finish feeling sick without judgment.

  It’s too late for that, the unbidden thought came to her then. We can never go back to that place. It’s all changed, now. He and I both.

  They hustled down the curving tunnel to Deck C. Park slowed, remembering that Fulbreech had said Chanur was on patrol here—but Jimex barreled on, unfazed. They rounded another corner and found the rest of the synthetics, waiting in the shadows of an alcove. Where they had been hiding before that, Park couldn’t guess. Their eyes glinted gold in the dim light, like cats in gloom, and they huddled close to each other, as if craving the comfort of the others’ body heat. Park counted: Ellenex dead, Philex, Allex, and Timex killed. That left nine, counting Jimex.

  “Good,” she said, trying for briskness. If she gave herself any time for anything else, she thought she might collapse. “You’re all here. Now we need to get someplace safe from the mutineers, somewhere I can send a message to ISF—”

  “We should free the sleeping god first,” Dylanex, the security android, said. He stepped forward into the corridor, looking pointedly at the opposite wall; Park realized suddenly that they were in front of the three utility room doors again. She flinched away. “He can help us.”

  Park frowned. “Who, Taban? No.” She didn’t think he was—malicious, per se, or that he could cause harm, but she couldn’t afford to introduce another wild card into the combustible mix that was already on the ship. She had enough things to worry about, to monitor and keep track of—including herself.

  “He can help us,” Megex echoed. She was holding one of her slender arms, as if hurt. “And we will need him, his knowledge, if we’re to stay on Eos.”

  “That’ll be after we take back the ship,” Park told her.

  “He is another body against Natalya Severov, Ata Chanur, Wan Xu, and Michael Boone.”

  “He’s—look, if you want him so badly, why don’t you let him out yourselves?” She remembered how the frozen people—Holt, Keller, Hunter—had been influenced by Taban’s intentions, his desire to be let out. Maybe th
e synthetics would never stop talking about it unless they gave in to that unconscious pull, that quantum urge.

  “It will take time for us to bypass the security protocols,” Jimex told her. “METIS doesn’t recognize our authority yet, not in that way. She won’t open for us. But you can do it in no time, very easily.”

  “I’m no hacker,” she said. You’ll need Fulbreech for that, she thought. And you’ll never convince him to let the prisoner out. But she fell silent at Jimex’s expectant look. Oh. He was not talking about hacking.

  “The only console that is safe to use is in the realm of the sleeping god, anyway,” Dylanex broke in, straight-faced. “You will need to go down there if you send a message—”

  “—killing two birds with one stone,” Jimex finished.

  “No,” Park said. “I smashed that console, getting away from Natalya—and I see what you’re doing, Jimex. Are you lying to get me to do what you want?”

  “I have not acquired lying.”

  That’s exactly what a liar would say, she thought, if indeed he had already learned to lie. But she could not read his android face; humans had not developed that art, that kind of phenotypology yet. They had never needed to.

  Two others appeared at the end of the corridor, then. At first Park thought it was Sagara and Fulbreech—she saw a male, dark hair—but with a sickening jolt she realized it was Chanur and Wan Xu. Both were holding guns, and Chanur looked livid, the whites of her eyes showing even from down the hallway. She must have found Wan Xu in the closet and let him out.

  “Oh, shit,” Park said. Jimex murmured something, and the synthetics all bunched around her in a kind of phalanx formation.

  Chanur’s eyes roved from the synthetics to Park, who could barely see—Jimex and Dylanex towered over her like a pair of stone golems. She did make out the look of calculation on Chanur’s face: she was weighing her options, assessing how best to draw Park out from behind her guard without getting too close herself. Wan Xu was looking at the doctor uncertainly, waiting for direction. He avoided eye contact with Park, as if it was easier for him to pretend that she wasn’t there.