Dallas paced around the silent dining room, slowly walking around the circular center table with his hands behind his back.
"Call Kane and Lambert in here." He said, lightly.
"What about Brett?"
"If he responds. If he doesn't, don't bother him."
Over the intercom headsets, she asked for the three to appear in the dining room for a meeting. After a few minutes, they showed up.
The grease on Lambert's clothing suggested she had found a hidden nook somewhere in the lower refinery maintenance access to hide away from everything, and everyone.
Brett's face showed a pained expression, acting reclusive and slouching down in his chair.
Everyone took a seat on the table, while Dallas remained standing, leaning on the table amidst everyone.
"I called you in here now, for a very serious matter pertinent to us all. Weyland-Yutani has rerouted the Nostromo in an attempt to acquire a hostile biological life form by any means necessary."
He took a deep breath, and continued.
"On this mission, every single person aboard this ship was listed as 'disposable'. Not only that, but they have replaced at least one of our own crew with a synthetic replicant, an android outsider."
Arms crossed, Brett stared downwards at the floor below him, under the table.
"Are you sure? Are you sure he can't possibly be our Parker?" Lambert said timidly, in a low voice.
He stared at her, momentarily unable to answer.
Sighing, he continued.
"I don't know. But we need to test everyone, that way there's no more surprises, like Parker."
Dallas walked over to the luncheon preparation area, and reached into a drawer, grabbing five steak knives. Passing them around, he gave each crew member a knife, keeping one for himself.
"After Parker, no one can trust each other, unless we truly know who's who."
He placed his left hand flat against the table, his fingers splayed out on the surface.
Glancing around at each and every person sitting at the table, he continued.
"Just enough to draw a little bit of blood. That's all that's necessary."
Taking the knife in his right hand, he pressed it against his index finger and slid it from hilt to tip, ensuring an incision was made just deep enough to draw blood.
The milliseconds between the incision, and blood coming out felt like hours to Dallas. The cut stung, equivalent to a bad paper cut, but it wasn't just physical pain.
The mental anguish he suddenly experienced, realizing it wasn't blood coming out of him, but the same milky lubricant as Parker's was, caused him to lose his balance and fall backwards, leaning against the wall.
Transfixed on his hand, everything disappeared. A loud ringing filled his ears, and the rest of the room went black as his very existence came into question with himself.
With Dallas' result finalized for everyone to see, Lambert panicked and took her own knife, almost slamming it into her palm, the blade digging deep into the skin.
She screamed as synthetic lubricant came out of the wound, an accursed sight to her. Jumping up, she ran out of the room crying, back to wherever she had been hiding away before.
Kane had a look of grim resolve on his face. Holding his own knife above his thumb, he said a few striking words to Ripley, and to Brett, who had looked up for once.
"No matter what, we're all in this together."
They both nodded, and he pressed the knife into his thumb. Slicing it, more milky substance appeared out of him, to his own surprise. Slightly shaking, he sighed deeply, and placed his head in his hands on the table.
Ripley's knife laid on the table in front of her, as did Brett's in front of him. He didn't have a reaction to the situation, just staring at the floor as he had been throughout.
Sighing, he grabbed his knife, and pricked a fingertip on his right hand.
"I guess we're all androids," he said despondently, after the blade revealed his own lubricant. Getting up, he walked down the passageways towards the medical laboratory.
Ripley was the only one left that hadn't tested herself.
Did she really want to know how she had seemingly 'woken up' in the past?
Slowly grabbing the hilt of her own knife, she clasped it in her hands, the cold steel handle quickly warming inside her palm.
Holding it for a moment, she placed it back onto the table. She already knew the answer to her own doubt, no testing required.
"What do we do now?" Kane raised his head and quietly asked the question, prompting them both to look towards Dallas, still slumped on the floor.
"Dallas? Are you still with us, Dallas?" Ripley received no response from him.
He took his hands away from his face, and stared at the space in front of him. After a moment, he began to speak, his voice croaked with the turmoil inside him.
"I used to work at Tyrell. Biologically engineered synthetic organisms designed for everything from personal pleasure to heavy lifting, with all the jobs in-between."
No one interrupted him, so he continued.
"I saw firsthand the stuff that company produced, before regulations and competition kicked in. Stuff that could make god himself wince at the crime against nature that company was marketing and selling as a disposable human."
His gaze lowered, while Ripley and Kane shared a glance of both worry and interest at what Dallas had to say.
"They were made, for all intents and purposes, to be an imitation human. They breathed, for no other reason than to breathe. They blinked, they ate, they drank, they coughed, everything was designed to make you think they were real. Indistinguishable from the real thing."
Frustration seeped into his voice, as he continued.
"But they weren't human. They were a product. Bought and sold for the sole purpose of utility, whatever 'it' was designed for. Company policy was to always discourage interaction with them directly after activation, and if it was necessary, to never give them any actual agency in a conversation."
Kane shifted in his seat, discomforted at what he was hearing.
"Work like that attracts real psychopaths. I rationalized away everything I saw, heard about, as just 'the norm' for the company. When they can make them for next to nothing, and charge a fortune in return, it's no surprise that any kind of cheap product can disappear when you're shipping it in the hundreds."
He looked at them both, giving a hard stare of resolve in his eyes.
"I did what I could to prevent that kind of stuff. That doesn't even cover the accidents, where they'd get trapped between crates and a loader, or a door, and get crushed beyond any chance of return. I was always tasked with deactivating them."
His voice faltered, catching on strings of emotion as his eyes wandered away, once more delving into memories of his past.
"They always went out saying how much they loved living. It didn't make sense to me at the time. They couldn't live, because they're robots. But who cares, right? Just turn it off and burn it already."
He smeared the lubricant in his palm with his thumb, as it glistened in the lighting of the dining room.
"I understand now."