“That’s unfortunate,” Keller said, studying the HERCULES’s tall steel frame. It was standing wordlessly next to her cot, watching the two of them with its head bent down at an awkward angle. “I wish ISF had given us a more recent model. The metal ones are so stupid.”

“I don’t mind it so much,” Park answered. “Androids essentially behave the same in any form.” The HERCULES bent then to examine the packet of files at her feet; Park pushed its head away from her, open-palmed, like it was an inquisitive dog.

“Well, just don’t bring it into your patient sessions,” Keller said. “People tend to get their guard up around androids. Plus there’s a matter of confidentiality: you never know what they’ll say or not say.”

“I understand,” Park said, and then bit her tongue hard enough for it to bleed.

The HERCULES dogged her silently for the rest of that day. Park stopped noticing it, largely, though she didn’t miss the quizzical or irritated glances of the candidates she went to visit. “What’s up with the clunker?” Michael Boone asked, rudely; the HERCULES surveyed him from over Park’s shoulder until Boone told it to fuck off, so that it retreated and watched them from afar. In a way the thing reminded her again of Glenn, the way he had accompanied her ceaselessly through the streets of New Diego; but where Glenn might have offered a quiet question, some sardonic commentary, the HERCULES only watched, and waited. At night, it stood outside of the doorway of her tent until frost crackled on its shoulders and the moon made it glow with white light.

“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.