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Call is late. Ripley is not a patient person by nature or design, has never liked or been built to endure waiting at home for someone else to finish a hunt. She paces their cabin until she can’t stand it, checks and triple checks the shotgun resting ready by the door. Call is never late. She runs patrol like the clockwork her ancestral models might have been.
Ripley doesn’t like time-keeping these days. She’s not under guard any more, not by man or by anything else.
The fire crackles in the weathered fireplace; something howls out in the woods; Call does not come home.
Ripley reloads the shotgun.
She waits.
//
Earth isn’t anything either of them expected it to be. There are creatures in the woods that shouldn’t be there and the people in the towns aren’t always much better, fighting tooth and claw to keep themselves going.
Something happened here that the Company didn’t programme into their latest models’ databanks and no one on Earth is talking. The market vendor Call buys their groceries for has a keyboard propping up her stall like it’s just another piece of deadwood. There’s an android aim hanging from the town sign. Call knows that, years and years ago, people on Earth used to hang pirates and leave their bodies to rot as warning to any others who steered their way. She thinks of that every time she visits the town and sees that tarnished arm, wires reaching for the ground from its torn elbow. You are not welcome here.
//
When Call staggers in, she’s cradling her arm and favouring her unscarred leg. Neither she nor Ripley expected her chassis to scar the way it does.
“They’re everywhere,” Call spits. She’s out of breath and Ripley is staring. She always does want to watch the colour rise in Call’s cheeks.
Call’s still not used to the depth of her own programmed vulnerabilities. Someone, somewhere, sat down at their desk and decided to make Call’s model simulate blood pumping through their veins just so that in a situation like this - their hideout surrounded, injury as unavoidable as oxygen - no one would look at her and think, robot.
“How many?” Ripley demands.
Call shakes her head, limping to the supply chest. “Couldn’t tell.”
Ripley swears. “Goddamnit, Call.”
//
It was inevitable, probably. Call has run the odds a thousand times at night. The two of them, alone, adrift. The way Ripley held Call’s throat when they first met; the way they caught at each other as their escape ship plummeted to Earth, the air rushing and roaring around them through the break in the porthole glass.
Their second night in this place, their ship in the woods, Ripley had reached for Call again. Call liked it this time, too.
Ripley is lean and solid and Call is soft to the touch. Both of their bodies lie: Ripley is flesh and blood beneath her strong muscle and Call’s soft skin is her only tender layer, hard mechanics barely hidden underneath. Ripley’s body hides a delicate beating heart but the only pulse in Call is electronic.
Call likes to press her fingers against the steady beat at the base of Ripley’s throat when there’s nothing between them but skin. Alive, alive, alive, it says, and Ripley makes her feel just the same.
//
Ripley has already moved to the window. It’s dark outside. She can’t see anything out there, not even the trees metres away from their cabin. Anything could be nearby - could be waiting.
“There’ve been worse nights,” she declares.
Call straightens up, reloading her handgun. “Yeah,” she says. “But that doesn’t make this one good.”
Ripley watches Call’s slender hands as she pushes her gun into her belt. Nothing about Call looks like she’s built to last. She doesn’t look like she’s been built at all. Ripley may have not have been manufactured but she definitely looks like she’s been made. The people in the town eye her the way they never look at Call.
Call could snap their necks as easily as Ripley could and both of them know it.
“We’ll wait it out,” Call says, firmly. “There’s no point getting ourselves killed. Not now.”
//
On the journey to Earth, the air still whistling through the broken storage bay porthole, the flight deck had got lighter and lighter as their ship hurtled, just this side of control, out of space and into the sky. Call has never said anything but both she and Ripley keep their fires burning until they’re desperately low on wood.
Sometimes, they wake up wrapped right around each other, as close as knifepoint. Call runs warm, because she’s programmed that way. To her, Ripley always feels cold.
//
They decide to push the weapons chest against the door. It won’t do the slightest bit of good but it’s amazing, Ripley finds, what brings them comfort.
Call grimaces as they slide the chest across the floor. The elbow of her jacket is damp, her arm shaking, but she doesn’t make a sound until the door is blocked over. Ripley doesn’t know whether Call was made stubborn or whether she just likes it that way.
“Come here,” Ripley tells her, and Call does.
Ripley rolls up Call’s dirty sleeve. There’s a gash in her arm, her casing split like overripe fruit.
“Can I?” Ripley asks.
Call finds her gaze and holds it.
Carefully, deliberately, Ripley makes herself wait.
Finally, Call nods. “Go ahead.”
Ripley sucks her fingers clean. There’s not much use, not out here, in the dust of reclaimed Earth and the mess of their unswept cabin. Not with all their clothes days-deep in grime and dirt under Ripley’s nails. Still, it’s chance at a human gesture and neither of them can afford to let it pass them by.
Call’s wires are wet and slippery as Ripley tucks them back inside Call’s arm. They feel obscene. Ripley likes it.
Call’s breath catches. Ripley smiles.
//
They’re running precious low on weapons and it’s two days walk to the edge of the forest, to the nearest town. No one will come to them, not even to sell or trade.
“Monsters live in the woods,” people always say.
Ripley shows her teeth like the wolves they hear at night, like she’s never been taught not to frighten.
Call says, “Maybe we are the monsters.”