Park was taken aback. She read no lie in the botanist’s topology; there was no insincerity, no calculation. Bebe wasn’t motivated by thoughts of glory in settling a new colony. Wasn’t plagued by insecurities about proving her worth to the crew. She cared about nothing except her work. She wasn’t just dedicated to it, and didn’t just work hard at it; she had real passion for it. Park admired that. She wished she could say the same thing about herself.

Tentatively, they became friends. Bebe, focused on her plant studies, seemed to take little notice of the stigma that Park carried with her as ISF’s “rat”; Park, in turn, was glad to have an acquaintance her own age. She found pleasure in watching Bebe devote herself to the mission—not even Keller did that, not fully—and hoped to model her own behaviors off of what she observed in the other woman.

It was at this point that she learned it was possible to fool a phenotype analyst. A person could lie without knowing they were lying; they could make a false statement while their bodies and minds fully believed it to be true. In other words, she couldn’t read ‘truth’ from someone’s face—only ‘belief.’ Bebe had believed that the most important thing to her was her work—but this wasn’t true. For the first time Park realized how fragile her own craft really was. Everything she read, all of the data that she gathered and interpreted—it all depended on its source. And every source, being human, also held the possibility of being flawed.

Bebe’s flaw was that she fell in love. With the young physicist, Eric Holt. They met a few weeks into the Antarctic training, and within a matter of days Bebe had morphed from a stolid, single-minded worker to a short, wet-eyed woman who sighed every time her boyfriend left the room. Suddenly she no longer cared about her specimens, her research on Eos’s potential plant life and soil composition; now it was all about Holt’s romantic gestures, the latest thing he’d said or done to vex her. Park was horrified—but it was too late to cut the connection, not without creating some very awkward dynamics within the biodome. So she had to bear it out.

Every afternoon Bebe made it a point to seek Park out, flopping down into a nearby chair so she could rant about the latest development with Holt. “I’m not usually like this,” she would say to Park, wiping her eyes with her pinky fingers, so as not to smudge her makeup. “But I’ve never felt this way about someone before.” Park would only nod, never knowing what to say.