Chapter 7 - Mortal After All

 

CHAPTER SEVEN
Mortal After All

 

“We’ve been here before Fifield!”

“I don’t know,” Fifield offered, “it all looks the same to me.”

“Boys this is the captain, listen up…”

Janek’s began via the coms in the helmets of Fifield and Millburn.

“Between the static electricity and the wind speed, there ain’t no safe way to come get ya.”

The Biologist and the Geologist exchanged looks of silent, frustrated defeat.

“The temperature is dropping rapidly, so get your helmets on and stay warm until the storm passes.”

“Captain, can you get a message to the scientist and that zealot girlfriend of his? You got a pen nearby?” The voice of Fifield filled the cockpit.

“No, I think we can remember it, what’s the message?”

“Tell them I said ‘go fuck yourselves,’ copy?”

Janek, Chance and Ravel burst into laughter.

“Copy that.” Janek assured. “All right boys, keep your heads down and we’ll come get you in the morning.”

Almost immediately upon the return of the expedition team, with the exception of Millburn and Fifield, Meredith Vickers walked with brisk purpose toward the room where David performed his secretive sacramental communion through the computerized glove and holographic helmet. The android was not the only one capable of using the otherwise restricted device. Vickers slid the glove onto her hand and then carefully slipped the helmet on her head and activated the orange glow of the visor. She was instantaneously brought to a rustic lake house encircled by a mote of rich morning fog. The first thing her eyes fall upon within the artificial world is a forty-inch by sixty-inch framed movie poster of the 1962 classic Lawrence of Arabia. Vickers did not so much mind the actual film itself, only the ties it possessed to the one soul she despised with every molecule of her tall, blonde being. The sound of Richard Wagner’s ‘Faust Overture’ filled the den room. Vickers did not want to proceed down the short hall into the den, but there was simply nothing for it; she had come here, she had lowered herself to coming to see him.

“Meredith… so what can you tell me of the mission’s progress?”

There he was in his superficial, forty-something state with a blanket over his lap and a glass of gin in one hand – Peter Weyland.

“I didn’t come to talk to you about that,” Vickers responded coldly.

“So you haven’t completed your mission?”

“I told you – I didn’t come to talk about that.”

“And I told you,” Weyland returned with paternal spite, “not to come here unless you found what I wanted.”

A blonde woman enters the den and both sets of eyes fall immediately upon her. She walks over to Weyland, handed him a small stack of papers and gave him a kiss before turning to look at Vickers.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to your mother?”

Vickers grunted as she looked at the computerized rendition of the woman who birthed and raised her.

“My mother died twenty-eight years ago. That’s not her, it’s some sick program you created.”

Vickers regretted coming. She had no idea what she had been thinking.

“I don’t think I could have gone on without some representation of her. Here I can keep all those whom I love close by… even the ones that haven’t died."

The laughing voice of a child was heard in the next room. A blonde-haired child runs past Vickers and out of another doorway just as quickly. Vickers couldn’t help but smiling at what appeared, at least at first, to be the computerized rendition of herself as a girl.

“David, what did I tell you about running in my office? Go and play in your room, my son,” Weyland smiled proudly.

The smile melted from the countenance of Meredith Vickers. She looked away as casually as her sorrow would allow. She was able to hold her emotions in check… until her eyes fell upon the family portrait where she had been replaced by a boy that held an undeniable resemblance to the android David.

“I hate you so much…” Vickers said through restrained tears.

“Excuse me?” Weyland said with genuine disappointment.

“How can a man of your intelligence be so arrogant and ignorant? All of your life has been spent building this damn company… and now at the end of your life, you’re destroying it all in some desperate search for something that doesn’t even exist. I hope you don’t wake up at all. I hate you.”

 

“Hey… what’s that?” Millburn broke the long silence of their travel.

“What?”

Millburn’s flashlight fell upon a thin, yellowish object a few meters off in the darkness. They approached it with care, the thing looked similar to snake skin. Millburn knelt and reached to touch it.

“Millburn! Oh don’t pick it up!” Fifield pleaded with disgust.

The idiotic Biologist did not listen. He picked it up and stared at it as it hung in ancient lifelessness.

“Looks like… skin.”

“Just leave it Millburn! Come on!”

Millburn drops the skin and turns to follow his unwilling companion.

 

Dr. Shaw, Dr. Ford and the android David were prepping in the med lab of the Prometheus for the initial examination of the Engineer head.

“Sample is sterile. No contagious present.”

Meredith Vickers entered the room. She threw a disdainful scowl in David’s direction before joining the others in looking upon the head.

“So, are they all dead?”

“What? Who?” Shaw answered with an air of distraction.

“Your Engineers; are they all dead or aren’t they?”

It had never occurred to Dr. Shaw that Meredith Vickers was anything beyond blunt, cold and calculated. It was so funny that now, of all times when the greatest discovery of Shaw’s life sitting there on the table, that she had suddenly gained a true insight of what Vickers was – an uninventive, overcompensating, stupid person. Someone fighting tooth and nail to show the world she was something that she was not.

“I… don’t know, we just got here.”

“Scan,” Ford went on, paying the bombshell Weyland stooge no mind.

“Do you even care if they’re all dead?” Shaw proffered.

“Weyland cared.”

The unfriendly tension between Vickers and Shaw was broken by the voice of Dr. Ford.

“Dr. Shaw, come have a look at this,” she said.

Elizabeth Shaw moved to the viewing screen; which displayed a three-dimensional rendering of the oversized head.

“That’s not an exoskeleton…” Shaw’s said with widened eyes.

“No – I think it’s a helmet,” Ford agreed.

“Let’s see if we can lift it up.”

Four pairs of gloved, female hands began tugging and lifting at the head. Their efforts were in vain; the head was impossibly weighted.

“It’s too heavy,” Shaw gasped out before looking to the blonde-haired android, “David?”

The synthetic moved swiftly into place and his hands began positioning themselves upon the horrific alien thing.

“Careful!” Ford and Shaw said in concerned unision.

A loud metal clicking sound, and then a hiss of released air. David’s fingers worked as fast and efficiently as one who had long mastered such technology.

“Like so,” the pompous synthetic smiled to himself as he carefully lifted the elephantine helmet.

A collective symphony of disbelieving gasps filled the med bay as the head of the Engineer was at last revealed for all to see. It looked exactly like the hairless, genderless head of stone within the mural room. Simplistic in its features, but ultimately terrifying in its uncanny resemblance to a Human… and yet no Human head could survive in such a state of preservation. The flesh was bluish and dried out, but the flesh was more than likely many shades lighter while the Engineer lived. Upon the cheeks and forehead appeared to be dark, unhealthy looking rashes.

“What’s that on its head?” Vickers butted in.

 Everyone moved in a little closer to get a better look; even Dr. Holloway, who was doing his best to be indifferent and displeased after what Dr. Shaw had done in her effort to recover the head.

“I looks like cells in a state of… change…”

“Yes,” Ford agreed with Shaw.

“Changing into what?!” Vickers blurted out.

Shaw paid no mind to the words of Meredith Vickers; not while she was in the holy palace in which she reigned – the lab.

“Ford, can you run a stem line into the Locus Coeruleus? I think we can trick the nervous system into thinking it is still alive?”

“All right,” Dr. Ford replied.

“Thirty amps… no more.”

Ford made ready the medical device; sliding an instrument into the dead Engineer’s left ear. There was a dull squish and then a barely-audible click. They waited a few seconds for any sort of change in the gigantic decapitated alien head. It remained in its state of lifelessness.

“Go up to forty,” Shaw ordered.

Dr. Ford’s pointer finger touched the screen twice; each time emitting a tiny mechanical noise.

“Forty up,” Ford said.

A slight twitch of the eyebrow and at the corner of the creature’s mouth.

“Wait!”

“Did you see that?”

All eyes were fully on the head now.

“Go up another ten,” Shaw ordered.

After a few more seconds, the eyelids fluttered open to reveal the desolate, black eyes of the Engineer. The whole room gasped in amazement; even the hard-nosed, ingrate Vickers stood wide-eyed. Suddenly, the head began to gasp and choke. The rash that had begun to form on the Engineer’s flesh began to fester and spread anew.

“Too much, go down ten!” Shaw barked.

The air of amazement that had filled the room was now one of growing panic.

“Go down another twenty!”

“It’s not working! It’s not going down!” Ford’s voice was overcome with fear.

The skin on the head began to bubble and pulsate threateningly.

“David! Contain it now!” Vickers screamed as she took several steps back.

The android quickly tapped a series of times on the computer screen. Emergency containment protocols began immediately; a thick encasing of glass and metal cylinder descended quickly from above and covered the head; which looked fully alive, aware and filled with confusion and agony. Each person in the med lab took a few careful steps back… all save one, who remained staring closely at the agonized head within the containment cylinder. The top of the head burst wide open; flaps of dead skin parted in four pieces like some overgrown, perverse flower of some alien world. The eyes shot from the sockets. The sides and back of the Engineer’s head collapsed outward. A greenish-yellow goo was splattered generously from every conceivable angle within the tube. The explosion had jarred most of the nearby crew of the Prometheus; all of the ones who possessed, as Peter Weyland had put it, ‘a soul,’ that is. David stood in the same spot with that insipid, artificial stare.

“Mortal after all,” the android said with a self-satisfied smile threatened to show itself on his lips.

Dr. Shaw peered briefly at each and every individual present before turning to Dr. Ford.

“Ford, please take a sample. I want to have a look.”