Rachel is about to vehemently object to that, because uh, hello, Tom might be a Controller but beating him up would be a completely backwards move, but Marco keeps talking, and she can't object, not when she's giving him a hard stare, her mouth halfway open. As soon as she realizes that, she snaps it shut.

"You have got to be kidding me," Rachel mutters. "This the Ellimist's doing, right? Showing me some freaky alternate future where we're trapped in space with a bunch of gross aliens?" But even as she says the words, she's not sure. The Ellimist is the only thing she can think of with the power to do this, but it doesn't add up. There doen't seem to be any Yeerks here. If this place was full of Controllers, Marco would be too, and he'd already have pulled a Dracon beam on her by now if that were true. The Ellimist works in weird ways, and they don't completely understand them, but...somehow this just doesn't seem quite like his style.

"No," she decides, finally. "This is something else entirely. This is weird, and you're weird, but I don't think the Ellimist is behind this. So start explaining what you mean when you said the Marco I knew."