When Park awakens in the sick bay and discovers from the very gruff Dr. Chanur that someone has been dosing her food with an emetic to make her ill, she is stunned that a fellow crew member could be so aggressive towards her. She also learns that her fellow psychologist and her superior, Dr. Keller, has been placed on a special project and would be completely unavailable, leaving Park to care for the minds of the crew alone. She also finds out that the ship's only engineer, Dr. Kisaragi, has been placed in cryostatis following a series of violent hallucinations. Before long, other crew members start exhibiting similar symptoms with not only hallucinations, but also a feeling of helplessness and the sensation that they've lost their tongues.
One by one, crew members are placed into cryo, as Grace races to figure out what is happening, with the help of her trusty friends, the androids. Dr. Kel Fulbreech seems to have a crush on Grace and he could be a source of information and assistance, while the brooding Captain Sagara just seems to have open hostility towards her. Then there's Boone, the security expert, who is one of the only crew members to wield a dangerous weapon and who also has a huge chip on his shoulder. Grace soon realizes that something is very wrong with the planet they have landed on, and worse yet, they've just entered a nuclear storm that knocks out the communications system, so there goes any hope of calling the ISF for help.
When a murder takes place, the remaining few crew members decide to team up to search the ship, but one of them very well could be the killer. Does Grace sit and wait in her room for her possible execution or does she get on board with the group and search the ship, which seems to be getting weirder by the minute and is somehow being affected by Eos. Even the androids are acting oddly, with no one able to fix them since the engineer is on ice. The truth is stranger than Park could have ever imagined, but will she survive this to make it out on the other side?
We Have Always Been Here is an interesting book as the chapters dance between what is happening on the ship currently, what happened in Grace's past to cause her to feel more comfortable with androids over people, and also at times, jumping back in time to when she was training for this mission in Antarctica. Each chapter also opens with a message, but they are quite cryptic and the reader doesn't know who is sending them until the plotline unfolds. Some are from the past and some are from the present, but they each slowly build the background of the story. I thought this book would be a claustrophobic space thriller about insanity hitting each crew member while they are all stuck on a ship, and it is, but it is far more cerebral in nature than purely thriller. I definitely enjoyed it, but it's got a good bit of buildup and development rather than just flat out terror in space.
