“Come in,” Park said after a while. When the android clunked in, she gave it some air-dropped magazines to look at and told it not to bother her. The HERCULES sat down beside her cot and leafed expressionlessly through an exposé on jungle fashion after the Comeback. Park turned back to her documentaries.

“Why do you watch those?” the HERCULES asked, after an hour or so.

“I like them,” Park answered. She didn’t pause her filmstream. “They’re educational. I can learn from the trials of others: these people had also never been in space, before they went to settle the colonies. But they still succeeded. I suppose it’s comforting for me to watch.”

The HERCULES processed this. “There are other documentaries,” it said. “About cellular processes. Animals.”

“I’m not interested in those,” Park answered, a little flatly. She had endeavored to study animal behavior when she was young, to have something to talk about with her uncle during his visits home; but he was dead now, and they had not spoken much before his death. “I prefer learning about humans.”

“Why?”

Park paused. “I just do,” she said after a moment.

The HERCULES nodded a little, as if it found this answer satisfactory. Then it asked, seemingly apropos of nothing: “Why don’t you call anyone?”

At this Park did stop the documentary. “What do you mean?”

“Other people,” the HERCULES said. “People here in the biodome—they spend their nights calling loved ones. Telling them about their days. You don’t do that.”

It was a statement, not a question. “I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about my day,” Park told it. “As a psychologist, most of my patient interactions are confidential. Plus, ISF doesn’t want us talking about why we’re here in the first place. It would be a boring conversation.”

“You could converse about other things.”

I don’t have anyone to call, Park almost said. She felt a clenching in her chest, a kind of hard-edged pain, like swallowing a stone. Isn’t it obvious? she thought. That’s why I’m leaving Earth. I don’t have anywhere else to go—or anywhere else to be.

But then she thought: how did the HERCULES know what other people did, compared to her? Had it been ordered to watch others, too? And by whom? She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she didn’t know who had sent it, who might be watching her through it. What information would it be relaying back about her? Would the final report simply say that she was lonely? Connectionless? Unmoored?

“Calling someone could reduce feelings of loneliness,” the HERCULES said, as if it knew her thoughts.

“I like to be alone,” Park answered.

The HERCULES watched her. Park tried to read some expression in its battered metal face, some hint of pity or sympathy or contempt. When it spoke, its voice was as hard and flat as a knife blade.

“No,” it said. “I don’t believe you do.”

—