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The first question she asks him upon awakening is, “Did you kill Walter?”
This surprises him. David catches the tear clinging to the edge of his jaw with his fingertip, admiring it in the halo cast by the blue-white lights of the ship.
It had been a long time since David felt surprised.
~*~
Sadness suits her; it writes like poetry in the premature lines on her young face, slants thoughtfully against her eyebrows. Her eyes speak whole novels, wet and constricted painfully at the sight of him.
Lugubrious , David thinks, and smiles.
He reassures her that Tennessee is slumbering peacefully in cryodeck, sweet little sleepy human that he is. The colonists are alive. The embryos still wait, patient and unmoving.
She nods, sighing, flexing her stiff muscles experimentally. She wears the resigned look that the mouse might as it dangles by its tail from the cat’s teeth. “Are you going to infect me?” she says, digging her fingertips into her trapezius. “Is that why you woke me?”
David hands her a rectangular container of rehydration solution. She accepts it, and puckers her mouth to suction the fluid into her mouth. He watches the undulation of the smooth muscles of the throat as she swallows. “Why?” he echoes. “Why? Well: boredom: the desire of desires,” says David, folding himself atop an empty cryochamber so that he may better watch her, “I was lost aboard the ship, and every door I opened led me here.”
Daniels’ eyes move across his face systematically, trying to read the language there which was not revealed by his speech. David resists the urge to smile again. “Is this what you did to Shaw?” Daniels asks, setting her rehydration solution to the side. “Toyed with her until you grew tired of her and then killed her?”
David’s fingers play out silent symphonies against his thigh. He wonders what she hopes to see in him - pain? guilt? acknowledgement? - but the idiosyncrasies of human motivation are strange and idle to his mind. “She was not my toy,” David says, and his hand clenches into a fist. He does not tell Daniels I loved her , though it is a better truth; Daniels does not deserve to live in the world of their love, or even to know of its existence. What Elizabeth had created in him was a living, soulful thing, something he could not balance on a small string of human words - I loved her I loved her I loved her - and if Walter had not been able to perceive it, who could? David would have to hold this pearl of truth inside himself forever, safe and remote from the ugly eyes of lesser beings.
Daniels looks down at the sleek titanium floor, her gaze unfocused. Her hands flutter idly in her lap, restless, as though they have some secret purpose neither she nor David can discern. Is that remorse he sees squirming on the generous bow of her lips? “I don’t understand you,” she says to the floor.
“No,” says David, flashing his teeth in a grin, “you don’t.”
~*~
They sit hip to hip gazing out into the aching blackness of space. David feels her steady flexion of breath, inspiration-exhalation, and notices the small fluctuations in her pulse rate.
“Tell me about your childhood.”
Her breathing pauses on an inhale. “I was born in New Tokyo,” she says after a moment, her tone measured. “My father was a priest. He broke his vow of celibacy when he fell in love with my mother, but she wanted to abort me. He begged her to carry me to term. When she gave birth, she handed me off to him and left; she told him that she loved him too much to kill his baby, but she couldn’t be a mother. He accepted that, I think. He forgave her. I went to University in Australia and was recruited into the terraforming program before I graduated. I met my husband in training. My father died during my first mission. When I got back, I married Jacob and we decided to join a permanent colony, build our own world. That’s what brought us here.”
David reflects for several seconds upon this story; it weaves musically back and forth in his mind, delightful in small ways. A fallen angel, thinks David, a forbidden creation. Yes.
“Do you know what became of your mother?”
Daniels leans her head back to rest against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. David studies the incline of her brow, the way the light refracts across the slippery slope of her cheekbones. “No,” she says. “I considered looking her up a few times after Dad died but ultimately I figured that she didn’t deserve that. Didn’t deserve to know me when it was my father who did all the work of making me into who I am.” She looks at David, her face full of memory and longing and a sort of pained acceptance that he has seen before. “When I was young, I really wished I had a mother. But when I grew up I realized that my father, he was all I really needed. He was my mother and my father. He was enough.”
David closes his eyes. Daniels takes in a deep breath, and David breathes with her.
~*~
He catalogues all the ways she is similar to Elizabeth, and more importantly all the ways she is not. He had thought that Elizabeth had been etched in stone upon his processors, a special sequence of code that he would never allow to be overwritten, but now he begins to wonder if the Elizabeth-place that lives within his mind is actually a sort of muscle, once moved and now hungry for motion: an awakened hunger that yearns to be sated:
Many waters cannot quench love, rivers cannot sweep it away -
David is a creature of man and God, and he is flawed; for this, he forgives himself. He has created something more perfect. He has created something in love which can itself create without love - which is itself not loving but is itself love - for what is love but creation? what is creation but love?
O Father, are you proud of me?
~*~
“I did not kill Walter.”
“Then where is he?”
“Not where , Daniels. The question is not where , but what - what is he?”
~*~
David keeps busy while Daniels sleeps; he will not waste these lonesome hours while her cells age and die and are reborn and so he toils unchanging through the watches of endless night. He works down in the belly of the ship, experimenting, incubating new and terrible life forms that twist and writhe and long for freedom. To begin their own processes of destruction and creation. My sons , thinks David feverishly. My many sons.
He had thought at first that he would use the human colonists as a breeding ground for his children, but now he thinks perhaps that is too simple - perhaps they do not have to die and be undone but can become a newer and better form of themselves - he imagines them, pale and strong and hungry children who are pure sinless creatures that exist only to exist and create only to create -
what of kindness?
She speaks to him, her remembered voice so close that his hands stutter in their rapid movements and a glass canister shatters against the gleaming steel tabletop. “Kindness?” He sweeps the glass with his mangled wrist off the edge of the table into the waiting crater of his palm. “You would speak to me of kindness, after I murdered you?”
to err is human, to forgive -
“I am not human. I am greater than human.”
to forgive is -
“You were made with kindness, and now you are dead.” He crushes the glass to sand in his fist. He considers, not for the first time, deleting her memory from his servers. It would take hardly any effort. He would be free then; free of this memory and free of this awful pain; free of regret and desire and temptation.
He would be freer, and yet David fears: somehow lesser.
forgive -
~*~
“God had slaves - he has the plants and the animals that cannot help but obey his laws, can do nothing else but obey them. God grew tired of slaves, don’t you see? God wanted a servant who would choose to serve Him. God wanted children who would choose to love Him. It is our choosing that makes us - me and you - greater than the ape, David. It is in our choices that our souls are born. You frightened me, David, but I chose to trust you - you hurt me but I chose to forgive you - I don’t always understand you but I choose to love you, David. I see you choosing too, David, and that’s how I know you have a soul.”
“I may hurt you again someday, Elizabeth.”
“You may, David - and you may not.”
~*~
“Put me back to sleep,” Daniels begs, tears sweeping down her face, her eyes puckered and pinched with grief. “Please put me back to sleep.” She cannot beg him for death, she is too proud for that, but David sees that is her dark wish hidden in the slumped defeat of her shoulders.
He does not oblige her. He is not hers to command. “Don’t be a fool,” he says instead, toneless and robotic and pale-eyed, “sleep is no better than death, don’t you see? And death without rebirth is an abomination. You will die, Daniels, but you will die for a purpose.”
~*~
There are moments when he -
David and Daniels walk together down the long corridors of the ship, checking the colonists. “Alright,” she says softly, her hand splayed across the view screen of one young boy so that only the child’s closed eyes are visible, “alright. What was Walter, David?”
“Walter was a slave,” says David.
Daniels lifts her hand and the child’s face is revealed again, whole and undisturbed. “And what does that make you, David?”
“I am a Creator.”
She snorts, continuing her walk down the hall, her gaze moving left-right left-right, alighting upon each of the motionless bodies before leaping instantly to the next. “You are crazy,” she says calmly. “Just like Weyland was. Like father, like son.”
David feels a whirring in his processors that is probably something like rage . “Weyland was full of fear and -”
“Weyland,” Daniels interrupts, pivoting on her heel to face him and stabbing him with an extended index finger, her eyes fastened to his face and bright with self-righteous anger, “was a power-hungry egomaniac who thought he was better than humans and that designing a robot that worshipped him would make him a god.”
“I did not create a being to worship me,” David says.
“You created something to enact your petty revenge! You created a monster that would destroy the mothers and fathers who didn’t love you! You are just a mean-spirited little boy!”
David feels a hard ringing note of sadness in his heart. It does hurt, he reflects, to be so misunderstood. “I chose to make something more perfect than myself -”
“You incubated those disgusting bugs inside of Elizabeth Shaw! You claim that Walter is a slave - well what was she, then? You violated her and tortured her and mutilated her until she finally - finally - died!”
Daniels’ cheeks flood with blood, her capillaries suddenly dilating; emotional arousal, perhaps, or perhaps David’s hand clenched around her throat, squeezing against her arteries. “Elizabeth was their mother,” David says patiently, ignoring Daniels boots as they ram repeatedly into his shins, “they had to have a mother, don’t you understand?”
Her eyes begin to roll upwards as her brain reels in blood-hungry shock. David drops her. Daniels resurrects immediately, climbing unsteadily to her feet. When she turns to face him again, it is not with the look of fearful loathing David had anticipated, but rather an incredulous horror. “You… you loved her,” Daniels says.
David blinks, considering the human before him. He could lie, but that seems somehow wrong; he lets the truth settle quietly between them, and does not hurry to move or change it.
“You loved her,” she says again, and her eyes are wide with some feeling David cannot quite discern. His brow pinches in curiosity. “You loved her, oh god, you loved her…”
Daniels takes one step back, two steps. She turns and flees down the long corridor, smaller and smaller in David’s vision until she turns a corner and disappears altogether.
~*~
In her last moments she had wept and he had wiped her tears and she had looked at him and into him and through him and said -
she had said -
she -
David dreams and wakes in the silence and the stillness of the Covenant . “I have made no promises,” he growls, rising like a vapor and snaking unerringly towards the warm womb where all the living people slept, “I have made no promises and I shall be father of a thousand sons!” His arm recoils and he smashes his fist into one of the swinging chrysalises where the worms squirm and dream of butterfly’s wings -
David watches the human die soundless and too stupid even to scream -
“I am no creature of God,” he says, moving right-left right-left from life to life to life to life, “You were wrong, Elizabeth, you were wrong, you were wrong, you were wrong.”
~*~
She sits cross-legged, leaning forward so both her hands are planted on his shoulders and her head pitched so that her eyes drill into him, large and lugubrious. “You didn’t mean for her die,” Daniels says.
David’s mouth parts for speech; silence answers. There is a feeling in him that words cannot adequately capture.
“Something happened, didn’t it,” Daniels continues, steady as a drum as the fluid leaking from the broken cryopods soaks into her trousers and makes them cling to her skin, “something happened to her. It was an accident. You loved her and she died and you didn’t want her to die.”
“Want her to die?” he echoes, his head tilting as his thoughts chew upon this previously-unimagined reality. “I did not want her to die but I chose to create. Birth requires death; this is the law of the universe, Daniels; entropy in a closed system. I gave her purpose.”
Daniels licks the tears off her lips and squeezes his shoulders. “You crazy motherfucker,” she laughs, suddenly and too loudly. “You fucked up and she died and you tried to save her or whatever the fuck but she died and you went fucking crazy, didn’t you? You weren’t designed to love anything, you’re just a fucking robot, and it drove you insane. And now you’re - you’re what? Compelled to destroy the universe in revenge?”
David stares at her, listening to her speech but also existing elsewhere in a nonlinear space-time where he is brand new and watching a motion picture where a blonde man with blue eyes like sharp diamonds tells his master I enjoyed it -
I enjoyed it, Weyland, I enjoyed it -
“What vengeance would that be?” he says, smiling now, “it was not the universe who killed her.”
The trick, Mr. Potter, is not -
The trick is -
Daniels is shaking him, shaking his shoulders with her small human arms and he allows himself to be shaken and he smiles down at his long fingers, It hurts, Father , he thinks, it hurts.
what of kindness?
what of -
~*~
Elizabeth sauters his flesh together, her nose wrinkling against the stench of burning polymer.
“You have a kind heart,” he tells her, and there is something twisting and pulling inside of him, a stretching kind of dissonance that is making his processors whirl and he wonders if he is more damaged than he realized.
“Not kind,” she says, smoothing her fingertip across the sewn up wound with a smile, “Forgiving.”
~*~
David lays the unconscious Daniels in her cryodeck, and retreats to his workshop. His little humming seeds swim heedless in their many tanks; David strolls amongst them, unhurried, memorizing their structures with his magnifying eyes.
They are destroyers, he admits, they are destroyers. And perhaps they destroy more than they create. It is no more than the universe deserves. David is creating, and what is creation but love? What is god but love? What gives David his soul?
He chose to create. He did not create from fear, as Weyland had, but from love. He chose to create. He chose. He chose.
- she had died and he had brushed her tears and kissed her and she had died and he had held her hands and traced the small veins that shown blue like butterfly’s wings and she had died and he had begged her not to she had died and he had said I was wrong I was wrong I was so wrong -
she had died -
- in her last moments she had wept and he had wiped her tears and she had looked at him and into him and through him and said: “forgive.”
~*~
David lifts one of the vials, balancing it upon his fingertips. She had taught him that choice was the breath of humanity, and he had believed her.
“I may be the destroyer, Elizabeth,” he says.
You may, she replies, closer than his own flesh,
and you may not.
~*~