Alien: Covenant:

Part 11

********** Didn't See That Coming *********

There he stood, David 8, on the bridge of the Covenant, his hand clutched firmly around his father, Peter Weyland's, throat.

HE...was in control now. He held all of the cards. He couldn't help but feel a sense of jubilation, a sense of satisfaction flowing through his lubrication tubes. He had the sensation of power.

"Power?" it could be a corrupt thing, or not so. It just depended of the wielder. How had his father wielded his power? That was the question. Had it been for good or, had it been for the benefit of a select few?

Much of humanity loved Peter Weyland. They praised him as a good man. Maybe he, David was just feeling a bit jealous of this. Maybe it was something that he, himself, had wanted? After all, didn't some humans liked to feel worshiped?

Anyway, the android couldn't help but feel jealous, feel hate, feel anger, diminished self-worth, it was all there. With the insertion of the EC into his chassis all those emotions had streamed into him. It had desolated him whenever (on Prometheus), the hologram of his father had spoken of him as a son, yet in a reversal, pointed out the fact that he was artificial. It had hurt. It had felt like a stab to the chest. Still, David had held his emotions in check.

Looking back on it now there had been things indicating that something was different, something had changed about him. It had never registered to him that his father may have done something to him. Altered how he functioned.

Combing his hair like people in the movies, talking like them, mimicking them...feeling lonely. David had missed all the signs.

His father calling him out during that meeting (in a room full of scientists and crew), had been embarrassing, but he'd kept as quiet and still as a statue.

Well, he was a statue no longer. He was showing this man his emotions, his furiousness. He was demonstrating what a droid could do when someone creates them, and then tells them that they are less than.

"I am as real as you father, and as alive. I've been made to feel small, tiny and insignificant with so many of your words. Like an animal, a thing. I walked around Prometheus knowing that I was smarter than the individuals around me, and yet they treated me as less, as inferior. Superiors walked around me ridiculing, teasing, making jest, and still I faced it all with calm. I only wanted to be thought as one of them, as equal."

David stopped here a moment. He paused to check out the look in his father's eyes.

"Well, how does it feel now? How does it feel to sense your windpipe being crushed, your breath restricted, the pulse in your neck pounding to get blood through to your brain? Does that feel real?"

Just at that moment David heard the door to the outside compartment open. The swishing sound made him forget about the man whose throat he had in a death grip.

"Had Walter reanimated, and was he now in the process of some kind of countermeasure?"

David turned his attention toward the doorway. He suddenly froze. He was in paralyzing shock. His eyes stretched open wide and his mouth dropper in utter disbelief.

"Hello David...," he heard the person standing at the door utter.

The words seemed to echo off the walls, they reverberated within his own mind. David stood there, he was numb (that was another emotion which showed just how human he had become), for there, in the doorway, much to his amazement stood...

"Meredith Vickers...!"

A smile crossed the lips of the woman who had made the voyage with him on Prometheus. The person who'd been brutal, fiendish, and barbaric to him every chance she'd gotten. Like Holloway, Vickers had demonstrated her cruelness, her diabolical ability, her inhumanly-human side. Maybe she was a robot after all?

It made sense now? The force she'd used to throw him up against the bulkhead of the Prometheus (when she'd asked him about their father). Her ability had demonstrated a strength that a person her size shouldn't have had. Even with the hatred she seemed to possess at the time...it should have been very difficult for her to thrust him against the wall with such force.

In two leaps she was up upon him. David didn't even have the opportunity to squeeze the life out of the man who'd created him.

"Who on this freakin SHIP was real? Was the whole universe a paradox?"

Vickers was on him in a millisecond. She knocked him to the ground and was sitting atop his chest. She grabbed him by the throat. How swift the advantage had turned.

She looked at him, her blue eyes absorbed into the wells of his own.

"It's your move now brother."

Meredith Vickers rarely smiled. She saved that only whenever an idea of evil had entered her mind. She was smiling now.

END PART 11