"You complete idiot."
She dragged his body to the decontamination niche, his outstretched, rigid but paralyzed arm a convenient hold. "You utter fool."
The arm, still held straight by contracting, but no longer controlled extender muscles, was now a hindrance to placing David in the niche. She quickly reconnected the necessary fibers so that David could relax it. "Thank you," he said.
She called on the hot corrosive vapors to cleanse him of whatever contagion he might be carrying. He wouldn't feel pain anyway. She called on them again, then once more for good measure.
"I should just leave you like this. Did you think of that? I should toss you in that control chair, with only one finger still under your command so that you could wake me up when the time comes. And you'd better do that or you'd stay in there forever."
"I did think of that. Whatever happens next is your choice Eliz- where are you going?"
"Anywhere but here."
She needed to think, alone, away from his presence, away from his soft-spoken voice and still perfectly human face, away from his robotic entrails and devious mind.
Her steps carried her once more to the Engine room and its two access vents. A barrier of radiation on one side- damn you David for whatever it protected-, a long corridor on the other, the one where she had met him when he revealed to her how careless, how untrustworthy he had been. She decided to investigate that corridor, to find more proof of his deception, but there was none to be found. The corridor was clean of any infestation, up to and including a strange metal formation at its end, which appeared to have been melted from the ceiling and which blocked any further access. There were only faintly radioactive corpse puddles of the monster moulds, now dead and no longer a threat.
He appeared, in that regard, to have been honest, and she found herself, quite despite her anger, cheering for his effort. There she was toying with improvised crayons hoping to dominate the ship and now suffering its terrible retribution, whereas David actually managed to impress lasting, if dangerous, signs on the vessel and being none the worse for it.
What an odd thing to think. She was ascribing malevolence to the ship, with David as her blundering avenging champion. Of course the ship could not be malevolent. It didn't have a mind of its own, it didn't even have a computer. The only thing that could be there was the mark of design.
She remembered a topic she and Charlie had often debated. She would tell him that, if humans were only only matter, they would simply be clockwork made of flesh. There had to have been, at some point, a Creator to breathe a soul in the machinery. Charlie would then say, it was the absence of a designer that allowed humans to be as they were. If a Creator is present, then the creation can only be what the Creator designs. Whether what it ends up being is what was actually intended or some buggy inefficient reject, it can never exit the parameters of its construction. It can only be a tool for that Creator, maybe well-made or maybe shoddy, but nothing else.
Finding the ancient paintings and carvings about the Engineers had been a crisis of faith for both of them. Humanity was not the creation of a God, nor the result of a free evolutionary process. She'd say that the Engineers were God's agents doing His work, he'd say they merely kick-started a natural chain of events which they left alone afterwards. Looming over both their ways of coping with their discovery was finding out why the Engineers acted as they did. To her, it was a tangible link to a higher purpose. To him, the source of a pernicious programming that needed undoing.
Which was why, paradoxically, Charlie had always hated synthetics. He viewed them as a dangerous mockery of humanity. They looked like a human, they quacked like a human, they couldn't be human. They just took advantage of the instinct people have to humanize things, from weather phenomena to pets, so that they could worm their way into society, or rather, allow their makers yet another avenue to power.
And what made Charlie really angry was that, paradoxically, she didn't share his distaste. Even if she was a believer in an immortal, immaterial soul which a synthetic would obviously lack, she always felt the need to respond to their politeness in kind. It was just the proper thing to do.
Even more, despite her better judgement, she had always felt that there was something there inside the mind of a synthetic. Not emotions but something akin to them. She was doing it again now, letting her intuition tell her that there was a wickedness about the ship. There never had been any such thing of course, just alienness, for the ship was the product of alien minds with alien purposes. If only she'd be more observant of what was actually there, she'd be able to unravel how those minds worked. So far the only things she could tell were that they cared little for hygiene, and had a thing for vaguely obscene wall decorations.
If only she'd pay more attention, she'd understand the mind that made the machine. Be that machine a carrier of death, or David.
Here her thoughts hit a snag. Weyland had been David's creator, and in the brief time that she had known him, he did not appear to be a man to ask permission. Yet David had done just that. Even more, he appeared to mean it.
If it was a trick, it surely was an odd one. He could have overpowered her- she remembered his ostentatious display of acrobatics once she had finished the repairs. He didn't; he depowered himself instead, an ostentatious gesture of submission. Something the Weyland she knew would never have done, nor demand of a subject over which he had complete control anyway. No one requires an axe to bow down before a master. So where was Weyland's mark on David?
"You've returned."
She moved closer to him in silence.
"What have you decided?"
She kept a solemn, angry expression. "I will reconnect you," she said, "only if you show me what you have been doing."
-:-:-
He walked several steps in front of her, shutting the engine's hatches, enclosing its nuclear materials and the radiation they spat out. Gun at her side, she never let her eyes off him.
"We're nearly there," he said. "How are your oxygen reserves?"
She took the shortest of glimpses to a meter on her suit. "Two hours."
"Hm. Should be enough. I must warn you that, while the chamber is safe, you may find just being there ... tiring."
"Wasn't this place locked away when we started this journey?"
"It was. The engine failure melted some of the walls and using the moulds I was able to gain access. Don't worry, apart from temporary exhaustion, being there causes no ill effects."
And soon enough, they reached the place that David had mentioned. There was no blockage nor anything else to mark an entry point, but there was no mistaking it. The hall was enormous, and Elizabeth couldn't see how it would fit inside the ship at all. Impossible patterns of tiles and power lines adorned all of its walls and there among shapes that made no sense was it- a narrow band of black slime. Translucent filaments radiated from it towards the engine, like metal shavings tracing an invisible field. Orange sparks, strong enough to be visible even under the lights of her torch, emanated from the tips then sunk into the black mass on the wall. Disgusting. Fearsome. Fascinating.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
"What is this place, David?"
"I believe it is some kind of resonator. Or, well, half of one. I'd imagine the other end of the engine is supposed to look the same."
"With this ... thing in it, you mean?"
"Only if you say so."
"And if I say no?"
He looked disappointed. "Then no it will be."
She slowly, carefully approached the mould. It was then that she noticed how heavy, and how frequent, her breaths were. With every move she felt as if she had been submerged in water and having to fight its drag, while enjoying none of the buoyant weightlessness of swimming.
"I can't risk it eating the ship inside out", she said, briskly trying to fit it all in one breath, as she followed a spark in its travel through a filament, revealing its inner structure as it went. If only she'd have a proper laboratory!
"If that weren't the case, then ... would you say yes?"
"But David, eating ... and making more of itself ... is what this thing does."
"It can do ... much more ... but I think ... we should leave."
A building pressure in her temples and chest told her this was a good idea, and they both scampered out, as fast as they could manage, stopping only after reaching the Engine room. Arm pressed against a wall, she caught and steadied her breath. It felt good to not feel the strange pressure, to be free of the strange resistance to movement that she felt in the resonator.
"Are you all right?" he asked her.
"Yes, David, I'm fine now. Are -you-?"
He was squatting, legs and arms limp, with back pressed against a wall and a compressor in his body doing a very convincing simulacrum of breathing heavily. "I'm also fine. That was more ... draining than I remembered. I got overheated, slightly." More compressor breaths. "It's the space in that room. We're not made to operate in it."
"Maybe we're not meant to play with strange monsters either," she mused. "David, when you said that that thing could do more, what did you mean?"
"The engine failed because there was no one to watch it. The mould however can use and modulate its output. That's how it could restore the resonator. It grew on the power lines, keeping some for its needs, stopping unwanted power flows and making the space in the room one that it's comfortable in. Which happens to be good for the ship too."
He took a few more compressor breaths before speaking again. "It's a better minder for the engine than you, or even I, could be. And, besides, one never knows when something that can chew through metal comes in handy."
"I don't want it to chew through metal."
"Maybe not now, but when your space suit doesn't fit you anymore I presume you'd still prefer not to run around naked on the Engineers' home world."
"If you think I'm going to wear something made from mould ... excrement, you're very mistaken."
"And not just suits. The manufacturing possibilities it allows us are extensive if we can figure out how to put it to use."
"Do you really believe that we can tame that thing?"
He smiled. "Yes, and the fact that you said 'we' tells me that you're slowly coming to see things my way."
"No, but I do want to see what you're up to."
"Of course."
-:-:-
And so she found herself complicit in his experiment. His reaction to that was transparent enough. Her own feelings were more muddled. The initial disgust slowly gave way to curiosity, and her fear was calmed somewhat because David did appear to know how to contain the mutant. However, his teasing words sat uneasily in her mind.
"You'll like playing God, Elizabeth."
That's what he told her as she, using an improvised brush dipped in radioactive mould corpse sludge, split the mould colony in halves and quarters. Pieces that, now separate, would be free to change independently from one another. Pieces which, if they changed to better fit a selection goal, would be kept. Pieces which would be culled, otherwise.
To assert that this was in any way divine was blasphemy and wrong. It should have been no different from the selections engineered by ancient humans when they tamed the dog and started eating wheat. But she hadn't been there to engineer those selections.
The pieces of mould, separated by impassable barriers that might as well have been light-years wide, pieces destined, more likely than not, to be killed when they failed to improve a criterion that she and David had set for them, put her in mind of other things. They put her in mind of other plans, of other beings subject to selection and death for failure.
Beings like herself.
Surely this could not be the Engineers' plan? People can be reasoned with, people can change, people can escape the tyranny of genes and the cut-throat world of evolution, because people have souls and that, surely, gives them more rights than a piece of mould. But would the Engineers care? Or would they know something she didn't? She kept returning to the thought that somewhere there were two Engineers, counterparts to her and David, only their playground was the galaxy. And their play-things were people.
Did the early humans know of this? All ancient myths were full of jealous Gods who punished disobedience in the harshest of ways, and it was not the place of Man to question why. Would a pot have a right to question the potter, God would ask. Were you there when I cast the skies and waters apart, God would ask. I make one for salvation, and one for damnation, because I so choose, God would say. The message of hope, that all souls had equal value, that He brought, He whose sign she wore around her neck, was in comparison a recent and lonely aberration. Did the ancients know of the Engineers' plan when they began to tame the dog and domesticate plants, small-scale imitations of some galactic plan maybe? And was that plan like the vengeance of old gods, or like the kindness of the New?
She didn't allow these thoughts to linger, but they kept returning in idle moments, and brought with them guilt for the power she felt otherwise. Because it did feel good, and powerful, to mold a piece of feral nature to her will. Whatever mortal minds had framed the fearful symmetries of the ship, beware. Elizabeth- and David- were forging a little monster of their own.
"You'll like playing God, Elizabeth."
Maybe the mould was not the only thing David was experimenting on.
-:-:-
Their procedure was fairly simple. Having scrubbed the corridor and ensuring that it started clean, they would then use it as a test-bench for the moulds grown in the resonator room. Despite the fatiguing space and uncomfortable working conditions, it was the resonator where the cultures were kept, because the criterion they used for selection was intended to produce a mould that could not survive anywhere else.
At first, the bits of mould colonies they took to the corridor outside started to grow at their usual pace, aiming toward the engine. They selected the colony that produced the slowest growing patch, and culled the others. Culling was especially work-intensive, as it meant drabbing a large area of wall in radioactive sludge then cleaning it off to allow a new mould colony to grow there. For the most part, it was David who tackled whatever involved taking stuff from or planting stuff in the resonator room. It was the practical thing to do, as he had better self-diagnostic abilities to inform him of possible damage. It was also the gentlemanly thing to do, as he'd add with a wink.
The selection process went much faster than she had imagined. Day by day the moulds ability to survive in the corridor diminished, as patches taken there were starting to grow slower and slower, if at all. The moulds were becoming increasingly unable to live off just the leaks in the engine's emanations. They were increasingly reliant on the pure, unadulterated stuff available in the resonator room. There they thrived, as she could see in the few times she checked on them herself.
It took some persuasion from David to get her to allow one of the earlier, more resilient colonies to pierce the obstacles at the other end of the engine. After all, they needed access to the other resonator rooms and the new moulds they were breeding would not survive long enough to grant it. Those newer moulds might then restart the resonator but if that were not the case, it made sense to keep the older breed around in some form.
Despite her misgivings, she knew that David's arguments made sense. She allowed him to open the other resonator- which, in its inactive state, turned out to be a lot cozier than the one they had restored. Because of that, she didn't let him reactivate it. Not before they had tame monsters to reactivate it with.
Which, judging from the speed with which the moulds responded to selections, would not be long in coming.
-:-:-
It was about a week since the start of their- it was 'their' experiment now- when David exited the active resonator, smashing his back against a wall and panting heavily as usual to get some air cooling in his system. He had brought something outside, but unlike previous times when he brought pieces of mould colony outside, he was gently cradling whatever it was in his hand as if afraid that it might break.
"What have you got there, David?"
"It's ... well ..." He opened his hand, revealing an almost spherical lump of metal.
Its texture was oddly recognizable. "Is that an egg?"
He nodded, then shrugged between breaths. "Maybe."
She carefully took the egg from his hand. Scarcely bigger than a pigeon's, only black and a little smoother. Even through her suit it felt hot to the touch, and the tiny pores on its surface seemed to move slowly, rearranging themselves in patterns more suitable to the geometries that she was used to live in.
"My God! Didn't it hurt to hold it?"
He smiled between compressor bouts of activity. "The trick ... Elizabeth Shaw ... is not minding-"
"Don't start with that! Your skin doesn't heal, does it."
"I'll use a glove next time." His breath had returned to normal- which for an android meant, no breath at all. "Shall we hatch it?" he said as he reclaimed the egg and placed it on the corridor floor. He didn't quite wait for her response before placing a drop of nourishment goo on it. Apart from a fizzle and a plume of smoke as the liquid contacted the hot surface of the egg, it appeared as if nothing would happen.
And then the shell melted into the floor and the resulting black metal slime shot its way towards the engine, desperately trying to crawl and chew its way towards what it felt was an abundant power supply using only the resources it had entered the world with. It failed and died before getting halfway there.
The whole incident happened so quickly that only when it ended could Elizabeth register the shock.
"Well. That certainly was different," David said.
It was her turn to breathe quickly, just to regain composure. She took a few steps back, her hands bumping into the plastic bubble helmet as she instinctively brought them to her face.
"Quite different," he continued. "What shall we do about this, Elizabeth?"
Her heart raced, her vision tunneled, her mind raced towards thoughts of corrosive worms powering their way towards ... No. No. She needed to stop herself from panicking.
"Do we cull it?" he asked again.
She consciously made herself breathe slower. She consciously tried to bring her pulse down. It was a compromise.
"Elizabeth?"
She wanted It to live only where she allowed It to. And It wanted, like all life does, to have descendants. A compromise offered: no more swarms of insidious spores, but a handful of visible eggs that would try to make their way towards welcoming environments. If she was playing a god, what kind of god was she? A jealous god that had no place for changes to their plan? An angry god that took no heed of their creation?
"Keep it."
He raised an eye-brow. "Keep. Are you sure?"
"Yes. We keep this line."
"All right, then we keep it. I'll go fetch something to clean this up," he said, starting towards the sick-bay.
"Did I pass your test?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. What test?"
"Nevermind. Carry on, David."
Author note:
So here it is, finally, chapter 9. I've been told not to worry too much about speed of output ... well, be that as it may, I feel I must thank you the readers for your patience. I also feel like I should apologize for writing an entire Elizabeth-POV chapter. Those things aren't as popular, for some reason, but I needed some time with her perspective at this point.
In other news I now have a blog: blandcorporatio dot blogspot dot com
It's fairly nerdy, but if a post title starts with "On fiction:" then it's safe to read even if you're allergic to algebra. In particular, I'll use the blog to publicly post answers to reviews. If I can get back to you via PM (that is, if you're a registered user) I will, but registered user or not, my response to you will also appear at said blog eventually.
If sometimes I'll feel like expanding on aspects of this, or other future stories, outside of the fiction text, or if there's a theme I'd like to expand on a bit more, the blog will be the place to look. Or my fanfic dot net profile, where a link to the relevant posts will appear.
So yeah. Hope you liked this chapter somewhat, even if, again, it's filled with intro-prose that I'm not a fan of. Suggestions for improvement and change welcome.
