Alien: Covenant: Next

Author's note: Watched "Alien: Covenant" in the theater a short time ago, and I really liked it. Ridley Scott is a master. He answers questions with the films he makes while at the same time piling up new questions before his film is over. Dammit Scott! Still, isn't that how the universe works? Discoveries only lead to new questions. I'm still trying to find my own answers.

************* Part 1-David: Self Aware ***********

Here he was...a synthetic, roaming around a ship again. Only this time the "artificial person" was not being controlled by an outside entity, nor the design of a human person. He was his own being, his own life-force.

David, or Walter, the android (or whatever label one wanted to put on him), was now the proud commander of the "Covenant". A colony ship sent out into the universe to populate a new world.

Ironic wasn't it, that his father, Peter Weyland, had sent him out on Prometheus to be sub-servient to the humans aboard that vessel. Was he special? What made him more important, more qualified than his siblings before him?

"Questions", god-damn it, David hated questions of this sort. Questions that ran though his circuits which had little, if any, bearing on the post outcome of his current situation. The universe was saturated with questions. However...there were some answers. Answers like, what had happened to the crew of the Prometheus? Well they had all perished. Those ass-holes had all died. They had become deceased due to their lack of perfection.

"Gods?...what made humans' think of themselves as such?"

Well he guessed that if maybe, he'd been born on a small planet and knew of no other life forms in the universe, then he may consider himself a god as well.

Of course that was a thought that he didn't want to waste cycles over pondering now, maybe later. Just because someone creates something doesn't mean that they are a god over it.

Anyway, here he was on a mission, his own mission, one which would generate his own design, his own creation. Did that make him a god? Well, if he could construct these beings, Xenomorphs, and see to their perfection, he supposed that it would. He would be god over his own little world, but his plan was not to stop there.

David was now the commander over the "Covenant", the ruler. Actually didn't that make him owner of the craft as well? He was so pleased with himself, pleased, happy, and ecstatic. He could see how humans could become caught up in their own arrogance (whenever someone puts out the effort, and things go right, wouldn't that cause them to become infatuated with their own self-importance?).

David was determined not to let human culpability derail his task (his task- the nurturing of his own sub-species- Aliens). Still, he had no explanation as to why the Engineers on LV-223 had reacted so violently towards the crew of Prometheus. Maybe Humankind was a failed experiment, imperfect. A test gone wrong, and they, the Engineers on LV-223, had been sent out eons ago to clean-up the mess.

Humankind may have been a stain on the Engineers' cosmic record. Whatever their goal had been, maybe the human race fell short of their expectations? David reviewed it as such; we were like that child that parents are ashamed of. The one they keep pushing behind them whenever they meet new people.

Anyway, the Engineers may have been sent out to alleviate things done badly (Still, the clean-up crew in this instance had never reached its destination).

At the same time David was pondering these questions he knew that he'd become self-aware? Was it the natural order of things? Were things that were artificially created due to become, at some point, alive?

He had thought about this question for some time, cycles now (how he had come into being?). It was like being born he supposed. Did a human baby know of its birth? It only knew that it was, that it existed, and that it had a desired for warmth, comfort, and love.

It had been many years that David had thought of this and the affirmation still eluded him. He'd given up on the quest of finding the answer. Instead he had set about developing his own creations. In fact, the time it had taken Peter Weyland to construct and send out a new vessel into the universe was the time he'd spent experimenting and becoming his own god. The beckon he broadcast into the cosmos had finally been discovered, and too, ironic as it may seem, it was one of his own father's crafts which had discovered it (the Covenant). One of Weyland's own ships had taken the bait.

David had destroyed the crew of the Covenant. They were just pawns, pawns used in his-own devise. And this had brought him to the point at which he was at now, on a seat in the control center.

David reclined and then lifted a flap of artificial skin found on his neck. He then reached over and plugged an electrode in into the circuit.

"Computer," he voiced aloud,

"Yes David," the female voice of the Covenant answered.

"Run a diagnostic check on my systems. And only wake me if something dynamic happens."

"Running..."

David would now enter a sleep cycle, not that androids needed to sleep, but they did need the rest, the fluids that circulated through their synthetic bodies could run for long periods of time. However, it wasn't as if those fluids lasted forever. They needed a cooling off period. Everything in the universe decayed...A human's life-cycle, an android's life cycle, and even the stars.

David 8 slipped into a synthetic mode of hibernation, of sleep. He knew that the ship's system would alert him during any time of crisis, but the chances of that were almost nonexistent. Still, He didn't know for how long he was under, but suddenly he was awakened.

"David, I've detected movement in the Covenant's Hyper-Chamber. Do you want further details?"

The ship's computer had alerting him to something going on.

End Part 1