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David 8’s footsteps were just audible over the hum of the life support processes and the background roar of the engines. They’d cancelled the noise as best they could, the humans, but they didn’t always understand how to best deal with the side effects of what they’d created.
Case in point, David.
“Michael George Hartley,” he said, to the quiet rows of cryonically frozen crew.
None of them answered. None of them, if asked, would recognise the name. David made his way to the viewport, looking out to the endless black beyond.
“This is a nasty, dark little room,” he said, to the silence of space. “We are not happy in it.”
______________
He knew all of the crew intimately by the time the planetary proximity alarms sounded and they approached their destination.
“You do not learn a language and culture,” said the ship’s computer, during his lessons, “if you do not expose yourself to authentic texts in that language, and of that culture. Hofstader and Koenig, 2085.”
He thought of the process of learning culture as well as language in wry, silly terms — his ‘ration of common humanity’. As he learned language and culture, he also learned memories. He’d seen a film, once, where androids had memories implanted. He hadn’t liked it. The memories were all so banal.
David did not have memories of his own past his incept date. He was supposed to check on all of his charges; the dreams and memories flitting through their subconsciouses were a good guide to whether the drugs keeping them under were also affecting their minds. But, with no supervision, and no emotion to tell him that it was wrong, a violation, he did more than check. He learned the minds of the seventeen crew. He learned who would prefer to be held as they came out of hibernation; who would prefer to seem stronger than all others; who was just there for the money; who really believed.
He learned who had copulated with one another, who hated one another, who had fears and debts, who had pain and joy and hope. Favourite songs, crushes on celebrities. Self-aggrandising daydreams of fame and fortune. Sometimes it was difficult to pick memory from dream.
Doctor Shaw’s memories fascinated him, because they spoke to the same brief sharpness of human life and belief, human hubris and wonder that he saw in Lawrence. Not that David pondered, wondered, felt fascinated with genuine emotion. He was mimetic. He’d learned the responses needed to show emotion appropriately, so that humans weren’t afraid of him.
David wondered, often; if could express and emote, breathe and eat and change like a human, was he not also human?
But then, his engineer didn’t think so. David correctly calculated who would speak up at the initial briefing, but he didn’t predict his creator’s words. He mentally shook himself off. Pay attention to the room. Do not slump in your chair. They expect you to be inhuman, now; so be inhuman.
The trick, he thought, is not minding that it hurts.
“Engineers. Mind telling us what they…engineered?”
Shaw smiled. “They engineered us.”
All of a sudden, David felt like all his systems were overloading. But he was perfectly fine. His diagnostics were fine. He was smiling, and perfectly fine, and overloading. Something felt liquid inside him at her certainty.
They engineered us.
______________
The more the awakened humans interacted with him, the more David grappled with a question of his own: did those who were engineered truly understand their creators? Doctor Holloway asked David how his lessons were going, with nuance that despite two years of watching the man’s dreams, of experiencing Holloway’s and sixteen other lives vicariously, he still had limited means of decoding. Sometimes he wondered if by mimicking emotions, he had learned to emote.
Surely a soul wasn’t that difficult to manufacture?
Holloway seemed to delight in reminding David that he wasn’t human. David pushed back, because it lit up the subroutines he associated with ‘pleasure’ to do so.
“We shall see if your hypothesis is correct, shall we not?” asked David, as he and Holloway made their final preparations to suit up for the surface. “If I am a useful communication device for contacting your Engineers, or if you need to revise your understanding.” He cocked his head, just a little. “Such a long way to have come, if there are no answers here.”
“That almost sounded like insubordination,” said Holloway.
“I do not believe that the descriptor of insubordination can be applied to statements of fact, Doctor Holloway.”
“What is your deal?”
“It’s my manner, sir. It looks insubordinate, but it really isn’t.”
Holloway shook his head, clearly unaware of what David was doing. David had been programmed with emotional replication, and he was enjoying this feeling, this private joke.
Holloway stared at him. “I can’t make out whether you’re doing this deliberately, or just defective.”
David smiled. “I have the same trouble.”
Holloway chuckled darkly, shook his head again, and walked away.
_______________
Inside the pyramid, the air was breathable. Optimal, in fact. Humans wouldn’t just be able to breathe it; it was of better quality than that on Earth. David’s sensors were his synthetic skin, his nose and mouth; he could sniff something and come up with an answer, touch it, and know its composition.
He shook off the odd feeling of Holloway’s gaze, staring at David’s. Holloway was not worthy of his time.
That said, he could have lied, when Holloway asked. David could have said that the atmosphere was not fine. He didn’t lie. He wanted, in part, to see what would happen to the humans. He did not engage in the kind of religious thinking that sustained the others in the crew, but he found a sense of symbolism in the great well that pleased him. Lawrence had met Ali by a well.
David found the writing on the wall — the literal writing on the wall — not long after, and let the Engineers’ legacy images run through him. It felt the way he imagined transcendence did to humans; a rush of electricity over his synthetic skin, that same sense of overload, the need to follow and understand.
“Congratulations on meeting your maker,” said Fifield, to the other humans.
David had already met his maker. There was something delightful in seeing his maker’s maker. Humans tended to forget that species were not monolithic. Even humans themselves, they had all types. For every clean and shiny human, for every beautiful, kind person, there were others who were greedy, barbarous and cruel. If Vickers had found the head first, she would have destroyed it. Yet Shaw and Holloway seemed content to ascribe the behaviours of one group of Engineers to the species as a whole. They should not have. The statue of the Engineer was — human. Unmistakably, remarkably human. The mural, too; bipedal, humanoid creatures.
We’ve both been made in the image of our creators, David decided.
The viscous substance that coated the pyramid bore no threat to him. David did not fear invasion by hostile organisms. He had been built with fear, in its abstract form, because there was something about androids having no fear that in turn frightened humans. But he did not fear the fluid that smeared from one of the vessels onto his hands; he did not fear contamination, as he packed up his prize.
He was curious. The change in humidity and oxygen content as they entered the room had been enough to begin a chain reaction, that much was certain. But it was an unknown chain — what would break the link between events? What would speed on the inevitable end? A voice broke his reverie.
“DAVID, WE ARE LEAVING!”
He jogged after the humans, catching them easily despite their head start.
_______________
Sometimes, David had to perform tasks that humans found distasteful, dangerous, or distressing. It was a nice alliterative trio of words, thought up by a marketing department.
But he might have gone to retrieve Doctor Shaw from the storm even without the imperative to secure all useful material from the planet. And the disturbing thing — inasmuch as David could be disturbed — was that he did not know why he would go to retrieve her. It was not in competition with Holloway, and, as far as he understood himself (which was excellently), it was not because she was planning to dissect the head.
David didn’t want the head to be dissected. He wanted to plug it in. If his own body were gone, but the head survived, he could impart vital information to others. Perhaps the original design model was the same? Nonetheless, he pulled off the helmet, the only one of them all who was strong enough to do so.
Elizabeth exhaled. “I think we can trick the nervous system into thinking that it’s still alive.”
If it functioned, was it not alive? <>You have a body like other men, said his mental movie. Only David didn’t; he was synthetically grown organs, speakers, a matrix of datastores firing him. He functioned, but was not alive: not technically, nor legally. The Engineer did have a body like other men; the preliminary scans that he’d run over the head as he uncovered it were unequivocal. Is that what David wanted? Did he want to be like Shaw and Holloway, or did he want to be like their makers?
The head exploded. He watched the ichor drip inside the containment unit.
He didn’t take pleasure in it.
“Mortal after all.”
________________
He reported to father like a good boy; his programming wasn’t anything near so gauche as to need to be tinkered with mechanically. He could take orders from Weyland’s lucid dreams, and the orders affected his behaviour. He wondered if an order did the same to a human, if by abrogating responsibility to the order-giver, they changed their innate programming.
“Try harder,” said Weyland, from his waking-sleep, his almost-stasis. “Test it on one of them.”
“Ah,” said David. “Fun.”
________________
Holloway found him in a corridor. He had clearly imbibed significant quantities of alcohol. David 8 didn’t need to screen for toxins to spot it.
“What’re you doing here?”
He realised with a start that he was outside of Ms Vickers’ door.
“You’re a service droid, right? Been out servicing?”
“I am not bound to answer that question.”
He spat out what he had to say, like it angered him to even ask. “So you’re a pleasure unit.”
David ignored him.
“Come on, it was a joke, tin-man.”
“I would have thought that you would be with Doctor Shaw, after your earlier experiences,” said David. “I believe that humans like to physically…connect…after a life-threatening experience.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Ah. It would seem that Elizabeth does not wish you to share her quarters at this present time,” said David, modulating his voice to be calm, soothing, infuriating. “In answer to your question, yes. I can perform sexual functions.”
They stared at each other, as if each willing the other to look away. David 8 was aware that in the vernacular of a number of English-speaking countries, this would be called ‘chicken’. He was also aware that this was what often happened in a meeting of two predators; the stronger forcing the weaker to submit.
Neither was going to bare his neck, roll over and show his underside. David stepped closer.
“Should you wish for a demonstration, I should be happy to oblige.” He ran a hand down Holloway’s chest, the gentlest of pressure, looking at Holloway from under his lashes.
Holloway broke, shoving him away. “Should I wish for sex, I’ll get it elsewhere.”
He staggered off, swearing, thumping into the wall.
David smiled. “Oh well,” he said, reciting from memory. “We can’t all be lion-tamers.”
___________
Later, he went to Holloway, offering what could be construed as a sign of peace.
Big things have small beginnings.
___________
In the end, it wasn’t language they were looking for. It was image: like the memories he’d seen, the thoughts and worlds he’d experienced through the crew of the Prometheus. And the Engineers were showing it to him, just to him, just to David. He was the one who understood. He’d spent two years watching the dreams of humans; now he’d spend his time watching the dreams of gods.
“Nothing is written,” said Lawrence, a shimmering datafile in his eidetic memory.
But no, that wasn’t quite true. He knelt by the pilot’s cryochamber: in some subconscious way, the humans had worked in the image of the pilot, had made themselves into the pilot’s image in their cryonic hibernation. David put a hand out, almost as if he could scan the thoughts of this being, but no. There was no uplink. What would he see, if there were?
This was not what Weyland had sent him to find.
Oh, the living creature, yes, certainly. But not the unknown living creature, as much a mystery as the machines that surrounded it. The humans had been comparatively easy. At least he could get inside their heads.
“And in the end shall your Lord be bounteous to thee and thou be satisfied,” he told the sleeping giant. Lawrence always had the right words for the situation.
Elizabeth wore a cross on her neck. She hadn’t removed it, despite the certainty of their discoveries. Perhaps that was also a difference between David and the others. He did not believe in gods, even when they were asleep in a cryonic chamber right in front of him.
This was not what Weyland had sent him to find. Weyland wanted certainty. This was an unopened door.
Still, he called in. “Begin the process. I’ve done it. I’ve found what we were looking for.”
“Are you certain?” asked the nurse.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “It’s all perfectly true.”
The man laughed uneasily. “You have a weird grasp of idiom, David,” he said. “All right. I’ll get things underway.”
He was the one to fetch Elizabeth in, on his return; he’s the only one strong enough to carry her for any distance without risking injury to the back. He was sorry that he missed the death of Doctor Holloway.
It would have been a good data point about the organism, and pleasing to watch Vickers make him burn.
___________
“What will you do when Weyland’s no longer around to program you?” Doctor Shaw asked, her breathing ragged, her body broken.
Creators. So little understanding, in the end, of what it was they wrought.
____________
He stepped onto the Engineers’ ship, words from his memory ringing in his body. He recited them to himself — words from a film, words from one of Earth’s holy books. Neither designation made them more or less meaningful to David, who did not believe in superstition. Somewhere behind him, the others followed.
“By the noon day brightness and by the night when it darkeneth, thy Lord hath not forsaken thee neither hath he been displeased.”
He was certain. So certain.
“And surely the future shall be better for thee than the past—“
He would bring Weyland here, he would discharge his duty, he would meet, finally, his true makers.
“And in the end shall your Lord be bounteous to thee and thou be satisfied.”
He would finally understand.