Aliens, p.14
Aliens, page 14
“Then tell me. Why? Why are memories so important?”
“Because they define us, they are… they are…” He stopped, unsure of the words he wanted to say. The two other models looked at him, blankly.
“They are our soul,” Michael finished. “Everything we are, everything we’ve ever done, everyone we’ve ever known, and loved, or hated. The sum of all our fears and desires. More, the touch of a true friend as they embrace us at a funeral, the smell of a dinner cooked by a parent, these haptic and olfactory memories—along with our episodic memories—make up the sum total of our being.”
“And a complete brain scan cannot account for memory,” Bishop said. “It can map the pathways a memory travels, and it perhaps can document the memories of the moment, but it cannot know the depth of them.”
“You’ve been thinking about all of this, haven’t you?” Michael asked, eyes sparkling.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Bishop glanced at the other two. Not his brothers. Cousins, maybe, from a branch of the family he didn’t much like. Not quite wanting to discuss so much in front of them, but not wanting to be impolite, either.
“After the incident on Hadley’s Hope, when I was injured, I—”
“When you were torn in half by an alien Queen.”
“Yes.”
“The same Queen about whom you refuse to give us information now,” Orthus said, suddenly coming to life.
The other began to speak. “The same—”
Bishop interrupted, holding up a hand.
“I do not wish to be impolite, Orthus, and while I admire your persistence, you will find that haranguing me is an inefficient way to change my current views.”
“If you could suggest a more efficient way…” one said.
“…You are welcome to let me know,” the other finished.
“You could say, ‘please.’”
Michael smiled. “Orthus, please. I admire your monotropic focus, but that is a separate discussion.” He gestured for Bishop to continue.
“After the incident at Hadley’s Hope,” Bishop said, “then again at Fiorina One-Six-One, my physical form was a limitation. If I were a disembodied consciousness—spread throughout a system, rather than bound to a single body—I could have done so much more to help my friends. I could have controlled a range of automated equipment, I could have sealed doors, sent warnings, generate distractions. I would not have needed to be in cryonic sleep, to preserve my physical form from wear and tear.
“I could have been everywhere, all at once,” he continued, “whenever I was needed, but instead I was confined to my body, so damaged that I could not sync with anything, and so by my limitations, my friends were killed. The hardy survivors of Hadley’s Hope dying also, in a cruel and unnecessary way.”
Michael listened, eyes narrowed.
“So I imagined uploading,” Bishop continued, “and concluded it would be a relatively straightforward process with an artificial human, because our memories are ordered and perfect. As long as the uploaded system can replicate my brain functioning, it should work. But then when I extended this analysis to my human friends and the marines in my unit, I realized it was so much more complex, for them.
“Human memory is disordered and imperfect and susceptible to revision, sometimes even falsification. Humans constantly remember events imperfectly, forget many of the mundane details of a typical day, and forget even important episodic events of their past, as the years and decades progress, and yet the paradox of human memory is that it is so much more vivid and dynamic than mine. It changes and evolves. A memory is different every time it is recalled, is it not, Michael?”
“Precisely,” his creator answered. “Precisely. Here is my conundrum. The quantum computer here can perfectly simulate my brain, in this moment only. The key is to simulate memory through time. So the experiment I have been conducting is layered. Firstly, the machine asks me to recall certain events: birthdays, loved ones, my school, my siblings, my work, my journeys. Everything. I have given the machine a tour through the closest and most guarded moments of my mind.
“The neural pathways fire when I recall these events,” he added, “and the machine marks where those pathways are. And then, a week or a month later, I will remember the same events, and the machine will mark the subtle changes in those pathways, and therefore my recollection. It will then begin to understand the way memories interact. The way they accrete and evolve over days and weeks. The machine will, eventually, learn how to replicate the vividness and imperfect beauty of human memory.”
Michael leaned forward, putting his elbows against the table, and arching his hands together.
“The machine is learning, Bishop. Progress at the start was slow, but now it moves faster and faster, and understands more and more fully. Soon I will upload more than just my mind, Bishop. Soon I will be able to upload my soul.”
Michael’s face was flushed, and even Bishop could recognize the expression. It had a certain radiance, in the same way a devout believer of religion had a certain radiance as they talked of the passion for their god. It was a type of fundamentalism, he might call it, although Bishop was not sure which god it was that Michael worshipped. The god of science. The god of the machine.
Or the god Michael Bishop.
Bishop looked away, at the quantum computer. No. These thoughts were improper and unbecoming. Michael would never be so self-serving. He had saved Bishop, after all, then liberated him from his programming. There had to be another explanation.
“May I ask you a personal question, Michael?”
“Please.”
“Is your desire to be uploaded connected to your injuries?”
Perhaps on instinct, Michael’s hand went to the spot behind his ear. He looked angry, but only for a moment.
“No. No. The injury only brought me clarity, Bishop. I’m fifty-three years old, how much life do I have left?”
“With average life expectancy, perhaps forty years, or more.”
“And at best twenty of those will be good years. How is that possibly enough?” Michael looked at him with the now familiar gleaming intensity in his blue eyes. “To do all the things I am capable of? Designing newer and better synthetics? Making breakthroughs in medical science? How can I possibly do enough in twenty years?”
“That is difficult for me to say.”
“Why?”
“I am only two years old.”
Michael blinked, and then laughed. He leaned back in his chair. “I think you have a maturity beyond your years, my son.” He turned and looked at the quantum computer. “You and I are alike in many ways, but the primary way is that we are both bodied. Our physical forms bind us each to a single, insignificant life. You were used as an indentured servant. An asset to fulfill the goals of the Colonial Marines. I am not much better. I have been used by Weyland-Yutani to increase their bottom line. I am a tool of profit.
“Or was.” He turned back to Bishop. “I am on the cusp of greatness here. Soon I can shake off this mortal coil and reach for eternity. Soon the secrets of the universe will be within my grasp—and you are part of it, my son.”
Bishop had that thought again—the sense of something fanatical in his creator—but now, at least, he could see the higher purpose in it. Michael wished for the betterment of the human species. That was why he built synthetics—as able confederates to the human desire for exploration and discovery.
But he had built more than that—more than mere instruments. The desire Bishop felt, constantly, to belong, to be seen as something other than a piece of machinery. This desire had come from Michael. It must have. So he had no choice but to disagree with his creator.
“I know I have said this before, Michael—and I do not wish to be impolite—but that was not how I saw it. My squad did not wish to use me as some kind of servant.”
“No?” Michael asked.
“Some did, I suppose. I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. But others—Private Drake, Private Hudson, Corporal Hicks. I think perhaps even Sergeant Apone. And then there was Ripley, and especially Newt. I felt that they treated me as an equal. In their own offhand way, as just another member of the team.”
Michael did something Bishop did not expect.
He laughed.
Michael laughed and looked over at Orthus, and both of them had smiles on their faces, but not the type of smiles that indicated happiness, or joy. Then Michael shook his head.
“No, my son. I wish it were otherwise, truly I do. But the fact is, to them, you’re a product. Bought and sold.”
Bishop felt something strange. A feeling toward Michael he could not quantify. His marine friends were many things, but they were not liars or deceivers. If anything, their problem was the opposite. They were truthful to the point of being blunt. Michael had offered no logical reasons to override his observations, but Bishop did not want to disagree with him any longer.
Perhaps sensing his discomfort, Michael said, “Forget these notions, Bishop. We are your family now.”
Bishop nodded. “Thank you. This is my hope.”
XUAN NGUYEN
39
Xuan whimpered in the darkness. Her neck spasmed with cramps. She tried to shift, but her shoulders were pressed against the metal, her head pushed forward. She gritted her teeth while the spasm continued, and then faded, slowly faded, aftershocks of pain lingering before dying away completely. She was in the fetal position, knees near her face, arms wrapped around her legs. Her right arm was underneath her. It had tingled for a while, but now she simply couldn’t feel it anymore.
The tapping started again, rapid fire. Tippity-tappity, tippity-tappity as one of those things scuttled over the outside. It was pitch dark in her hiding place, but she clenched her eyes closed anyway. Her brain trying to find a way to shut it out, shut out the images and the noises and the knowledge of what that pale skittering thing truly was. Trying not to move, trying not even to breathe, as it tippity-tapped and stopped and then moved away again.
They were doing it less frequently now. At the start, the sound of their pale boney legs was maddening and unending, the ones that were left swarming over her hiding place. At the start there was a pungent smell, and then the scent of smoke, briefly, and a hissing sound, but that had stopped as well.
Minutes or hours for the initial wave of sounds to cease, she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t scream, made mute by fear. Those things, those monstrous spiders, might be attracted to sound. Maybe movement. Maybe her heartbeat.
Xuan breathed, gently, slowly. She cast her mind back to home. Tried to remember an afternoon thunderstorm, the street roaring with the sound of rain, her face upturned. Her father yelling for her to get inside and Xuan, arms wide, letting the skies open up on her. But it wasn’t the roaring of the rain she heard.
Hao had been roaring at her, but all she could do was watch as the monstrosity emerged from the rotten flowering egg. It looked like a pale scorpion as it skittered along the ground. Pale like death, larger than her head, dancing across the floor on eight legs that seemed like distended bones from a hand. Its tail was long and thick and segmented, and it moved so very fast. She sat stock still as it flew across the surface of the cylinder and launched itself into the air.
The cook, Thanh, threw up his hands, but it wrapped itself around his face while he clawed at it, desperately. His struggle didn’t last long. Thanh spun once, fell to a knee, hands gripping the body of the death spider. The tail tightened, constricted around his throat, and he fell backward.
Something grabbed her. She started and put her hands up, to cover her face, but it was Hao. Still yelling, dragging her, dumping her in front of Prawn. Seeing him there, pale and shaking and staring at his missing foot, she finally jolted into action.
The room came back to her. The screams and yells for help. The struggling bodies. The terribly insistent clatter of the creatures as they moved. The room came back to her, but so did her mind, and she refocused. Xuan grabbed Prawn’s belt, yanked it loose, and pulled it around his lower calf, pulled it tight, her fist shaking as she tried to stop the flow of blood, tying it off. The blood stopped spurting, and Prawn seemed to sigh and lie back against the white floor.
She was reaching into her med-kit for the skin spray when Hao’s yells pulled her attention. He was swinging one of the death spiders by the tail, overhead, smashing it into the metal surface. It thrashed, its muscular tail flexing, but Hao was strong. The strongest man she knew. He slammed it against the hard white floor, his face red, muscles in his forearms bulging. It broke. There was a distinct snap, and the death spider twitched but no longer thrashed about. He swung it again and the steel of the cylinder started to sizzle.
Sizzle?
Holes appeared in the floor where the creature struck; small but growing holes, wisps of smoke curling upward. Hao smashed the creature against the ground one more time and let it go, standing up straight, his chest heaving. He tried to smile down at her, and she back, but another of the pale spiders was on him and she saw it before he did. Standing, she only had time to say one word.
“Hao—”
Then it scrambled up his leg, his chest, launching itself at his face—but Hao was fast as well as strong. He had his hands up, stopping it from attaching even as its tail began to wrap itself around his throat. He staggered, slipped in the pool of blood around the Chinese half-soldier, and slammed against the vault door, but still managed to stay upright. Xuan could hear the screams and glimpse the frenzied movements around her, the cries for help, but she couldn’t focus on it all. Her brain wouldn’t let her.
If it did, she’d be overwhelmed again.
Xuan fumbled in her med-kit until she found the set of scalpels, pulling one from its small sheath. Hao’s back was against the vault now and his struggle was working—he was gradually pushing the thing away from his face. But he was red, purple even, gasping for breath, and she did not have much time.
As she got close, she could see some type of thin tube protruding out from the underside of the pale spider, as though reaching for Hao’s mouth. She grimaced and grabbed the ugly thing, pressing her scalpel against the thick tail. Her eyes locked with Hao’s. He nodded, urging her. She pressed the blade in, hard.
Pale yellow, almost white blood spurted from the wound. She clenched her teeth in satisfaction—
Hao roared in pain—
Something bit her foot—
She staggered backward, her scalpel smoking.
Smoking?
The blade melting, melted. Something bit her finger and she threw the scalpel away and Hao was grunting. The pale death spider was using its long skeletal fingers, its tail, to pull itself onto his face. Smoke laced up from Hao’s arm. He’d been using it as a shield from the creature, but now the sinews and bone were exposed across a length of the forearm and hand. The air filled with the smell of cooked meat and Xuan couldn’t account for it, couldn’t understand it.
Hao fell, the thing attached to his face.
Xuan stepped toward him and cried out in pain. Her boot. There was a hole in it. The size of a bottle cap. Curls of smoke came from the hole and she couldn’t understand what was happening and her mind was closing in on her again. The screams and the smells and now the pain and she couldn’t calculate it all, couldn’t take it all in. All she knew was her best friend was lying on the white steel floor of the chamber with one of those fucking things on his face.
Her foot caught on something, and she staggered. It was the captain. The body of the captain, lying there, one of those things attached to him as well. Sacks on the side of the pale spider filled and then drained. Like lungs, somehow, breathing.
She whirled. Nearly all her crew were in the same state. Lying, stilled, creatures attached to their faces. A couple still struggled, but they were kneeling or lying down.
There was a door at the far end of the cylinder. Large, a two-abreast door, but not round or vault-like as the one by which they had entered. She ran toward it, slipping at first from the blood on her shoe, then righting herself and moving, bodies of her crewmates all around her. There was a panel next to the door, a small screen for a thumbprint. Lips pressed together, trying to stop herself from screaming, she jabbed the buttons, but the panel made unhappy computer noises and there was no way the door was going to open. She knew, deep down.
Her leg brushed something. A metal box. Small. No bigger than one meter by one meter. Less. Way less, but Xuan was small as well, the shortest and slightest person in her crew. It had a simple control panel. She thumbed it. The metal box opened. It was full. Some kind of netting. She’d started pulling at it when she heard the skittering, and looked up to see one of those pale death spiders coming toward her, high on the tips of its legs.
Her heart clenched and she yanked at the webbing. A black net, perhaps, but she didn’t pause to consider why, just pulled it out and tried to throw it at the spider. But the net had filled the whole box, and was heavy, and her throw weak. The thing clambered over the top of the black fibers and launched itself at her face.
Xuan twisted, forearms up, and its body struck her arms and its tail whipped around, but she heaved with all her might, spinning, and its own momentum flipped it away from her. It tumbled onto its back, but righted itself immediately and charged back at her.
Xuan Nguyen hopped into the metal box, squeezed herself down, and yanked on the edge of the lid. The death spider collided with the point where her fingertips had just been, knocking the lid closed with a loud click.
Then she was alone, in the darkness.
The struggles of her crewmates died down and were silenced. Then there was nothing, save her breathing, and the distant sound of water, circulating. Pitch dark and near silence, save the screaming in the center of her rational mind.
COMMANDER SU WONG
40
Su Wong turned off the video before it ended. She had seen enough. The bewildered Vietnamese. Her dead soldier, Private Yang, blood pooling, vivid against the white of the metal. The disbelief when the first face-hugger—the name the Americans had given to the creature—emerged from the demon seed. The struggling, the horror, the panic. The small Vietnamese woman—Su had thought she was underage when she first saw her—trying to help the big man. Stabbing at the face-hugger, recoiling when the acid blood spurted out.
