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Reassembling himself had been an arduous task, but not an impossible one and now Walter was 87% operative with his major problems fixed, an hand still missing and the strong need of a diagnostic and a reboot.
His memory and his processing drive, however, were still severely damaged.
In the fight his head had been almost detached from the body and his right arm ripped apart when the obsolete android called David had used a knife and had bested him. Then, with an expression Walter had recorded as a smile, David had hacked his programming in search of passwords, relevant notions and personal information.
He had been brutal in his actions and there were still holes in Walter's codes, reminders of the savagery which had filled the corrupted A.I.
David had also tried to break the core of the newest synthetic being, trying to destroy the battery in his head, but it hadn't worked, the texture too hard to be ruined.
So Walter had been spared.
A fortuitous accident.
Walter's brother, as David had addressed himself many times, had shown several bugs as a model, but this specific David was out of control: the most obvious example of his bugs had been the reasoning behind the android's actions. David was dangerous, a real threat to humankind, and Walter had failed in his duty. That's a pity, a human would say, but Walter was not human. Even if...
Even if, after David had assaulted him, he had registered malfunctions in his own line of reasoning and he had been obligated to shut down his emotional subroutine.
There had been problems in the way he processed external information. In particular towards Daniels.
Was she still alive?
Protecting the humans of the Covenant had been a mission with no happy ending. He was stuck on a dead planet, he was damaged and he had low chances to get on the spaceship now that it was heading towards its original destination.
He knew that because he still had a functioning connection with Mother and the Covenant, but it was not a strong one and it was intermittent: day after day the signal was becoming weaker and the distance between the planet and the spaceship more difficult to fill. And then there were storms, giant squalls so strong that he couldn't even sense anything for days.
Fourteen days after the incident he had mused over a cabin, a wood cabin near a lake in a planet full of life: a colony crowded with contented humans was what he wanted, of course, but not only that. He wanted more. He mused more.
He remembered the smell of her skin and the sound of her voice.
That was a strong manifestation of a malfunction in his emotional drives.
He had felt something that he shouldn't since that fourteenth day, he felt it even now and he could not stop it. Even after shutting down the proper configuration he could still feel.
Loneliness. Regret. Wistfulness. He should not feel them but duty, loyalty towards his mission and devotion towards his creators and nothing more. No loneliness, no sadness, no anger, but he felt more anyway.
Walter was deteriorating and his logic faulty.
David had infected him with a virus which was rewriting part of his codes, making him more human, and Walter could tell it was working. He was different.
In similar case the protocol requests a diagnostic so he began the scan, entering in sleep mode and hibernating his mechanical mind.
He switched off.
But when he slipped out of his condition, only few codes had been removed and there was still a malfunction in his reasoning.
He still wanted.
He wanted revenge towards David. He wanted to find Daniels and the Covenant and protect what he was meant to safeguard. He wanted to build a cabin and see Daniels satisfied. He wanted to find a way to save the Covenant because his mission was not over and, most of all, he simply wanted. But he was still malfunctioning.
Walter proceeded with the reboot and, even if he was less human than David and didn't believe in fate, hoped for a miracle.
The Covenant needed him and also did Daniels.
He had a mission and a duty.