Park blinked. “Not at all, it feels like. Things have been . . . busy.”

Fulbreech almost snorted. “That’s an understatement. Ever since we landed, things have gone from zero to one hundred, fast. In the old days we would have called it a PFS.”

“PFS?”

“Pretty Fucky Situation. It’s old netspeak.”

“I never heard it,” Park said dryly, “and I spent a lot of time on the cyberstream.”

“See, that’s how I know you didn’t,” Fulbreech said, his mouth quirking. “The real denizens still called it the net.”

“You’re not older than me, Fulbreech.”

He laughed. “No, but I learned everything from my older brother, and he insisted on doing things the old-school way. So the ’stream was still called the ‘net,’ and ‘crash’ was actually ‘cool,’ and so on and so forth.”

She remembered that he’d mentioned his brother before, in her office. The one who’d had a baby recently. “You’re close to your family,” she found herself saying. She said it musingly, as if it were an interesting trivia fact. Some impersonal little statistic, something someone might say to impress others—to provoke exclamations of amazement. She couldn’t imagine what it was like, having the ISF dictate whether you could see or speak to someone you loved. She didn’t have an analogous relation in her own life. Couldn’t make a comparison in terms of the pain, or the gratitude, or the fear that came with such an arrangement.

Fulbreech looked at her sidelong, as if he knew her thoughts. “Who isn’t?” he asked.

“People who have no family, for one thing.” It was a naïve statement on his part, she thought without emotion. It showed that he took his situation for granted.

Fulbreech grimaced, registering his misstep—but he forged onward. “You adopt the androids as your family, in a way. I saw how they rallied around you last night.”

For a moment Park wanted to confess to him the strangeness of the androids’ behavior the night before; their “assimilation,” their odd decision-making. The signs of them . . . going strange. But Jimex had reverted back to mostly normal in the morning, it seemed; and she was afraid that things could get misinterpreted, propagandized. She didn’t need to spark yet another panic on the ship. Mass hysteria. So she decided against it.

“I didn’t ask them to do that,” Park told him. “They just—did it. They tend to like me, in the way that dogs tend to gravitate toward certain people.”

“But robots are not dogs,” he said. “You can’t tell me we program that instinct into them.”

“We give them the protocol to self-preserve. Barring certain circumstances. And all self-preserving beings will prefer people who hold goodwill toward them over people who do not. Jimex knows I look out for him, and because he’s connected to the rest of the crew, they share that sense, too.”