the machine in your hand
by skazka

the machine in your hand

skazka

Summary

They do a lot of talking in the sweet air of the control room, about everything and nothing.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 433837.

Hardware

They do a lot of talking in the sweet air of the control room, about everything and nothing. Faith, dreams, where they came from and where they are headed. The universe, angels, robots, children. (Only obliquely, but Shaw is numb enough that none of it hurts. It seems necessary. David is sterile too, and when he is not trying to hurt her, he has a great deal to say about mothers and fathers.) And more practically, they talk about food, salvage, the ship itself. David tries to teach her the Engineers' characters, which would be easier if he had pen and paper, and hands that could do more than twitch uselessly at the ends of dead arms. He recites language programs and coaches her on alien phonemes; those she can recognize, though not without her gut clenching at her own fragmented memories. It's not like learning French or Greek or Afrikaans, this language holds together like sand, but she already speaks with her Maker, she would like to know His offspring too. And she'd rather not have the android do all her speaking for her, even if they are cooperating.

There is water, there is a full nutrition reservoir in Elizabeth's suit, and they are equipped for something like cryosleep. The duffel bag is thoroughly scavenged now, and it is beginning to stink like liquid latex, but David's head is almost back on his shoulders. Almost.

Shaw leans over to reach for a salvaged implement -- and quickly finds herself doubled over.

"Careful now!"

"Shut up, David, I'm trying to help you." She slams her hand on the console, sucking in a hard breath as a cramp of pain shoots through her, without adrenaline to deaden it. With her teeth in her lip she manages to choke out something like a joke. Humor helps, a little. "At least you aren't in pain."

"There's that, at least. The discomfort would be unbearable." His voice is mild as milk, and amused. "I don't recommend any further injections for a few days. In the breast pocket of my uniform you'll find Paracetamol tablets, pain relief lozenges, thallium, arsenic, rusted nails..."

"David."

"Sorry. Just seeing if you were paying attention."

The actuators and wires of his throat and chest have to be reconnected each to each now, as best she's able with unfamiliar resources. David's tinny direction narrates the whole ordeal at intervals. She'll never be a masterful engineer, but putting shards together is a damn sight easier than surgery. Her hands are covered in small cuts.

"T.E. Lawrence was an archaeologist in his youth, Dr. Shaw," David says, apropos of nothing in the course of his directions. Periodically he produces these facts, to amuse her, to amuse himself has he languishes in boredom, or perhaps to get under her skin again. She knows nothing whatsoever about Lawrence, and frankly she does not care. Elizabeth doesn't look at his face, and wipes up another dab of milky servo fluid from under her wrist.

"Not like me. He must have had colleagues," Elizabeth says, clippedly. Something sharpens in her, a tight awful feeling rises in her throat out of the dull mess of aches her body has become.

"Yes," David says. "But few peers. Do you miss your crewmates? Solitary as you are, you must long to engage with your fellow humans. Even I do at times, is that cruel?"

"Please, David, be quiet. I'll throw you on the floor."

He falls silent. Even the whirring of his servos stops. All she is left with is rustling cords, her own labored breathing, and the fluid as it drips. A throb that could come from the ship itself, like a pulse sounding out.

"Thank you for your assistance," David finally says. The line of his mouth, his faulty smile, is like a typographical bracket.

Andros

Notes

(Additional warnings this chapter for at least the fear of sexual assault, and talk of reproductive issues/Shaw's infertility.)

The latex is doing its part like actual blood, to patch up holes in the artificial dermis, and on David's instruction she's moistened the seams and valves. Everything is in place now -- not exactly securely, but slapdash is is better than nothing. There would be plenty of staples left in the medpod, but that's far behind them, and hardly somewhere to which they can return. The only staples are due to work their way out of Shaw's abdomen any day now. One or two have already popped out, to her alarm.

She can feel an artificial heartbeat start up against her arm.

"Do you hear that?"

"Yes--" David says, breathlessly. His eyes glitter like a fever.

His arm comes to life again, flexing convulsively and then gently laying down flat -- the fingers folding up to make a fist and then spreading out broadly until the artificial tendons stand out on the back of his hand. His chest begins to rise, with one gasping unnecessary breath, he moves one leg, and then the other. He raises his chin carefully, and looks thoroughly relieved.

"Thank you, Dr. Shaw. I can proceed with self-maintenance from here, if you would like."

Shaw smiles. "Good luck, David."

Elizabeth has resigned herself to sleeping in her underwear. The suit is showing its wear, and while she still has repair patches to spare, it is also smoked with sweat. David, of course, does not sleep unless he wants to, fully clothed or otherwise. There is no way of telling whether it's day or night, with no reference points of any importance and a working climate control function, so they rely on David's awe-inspiring processing power to dictate whether it's a quarter-past three in the afternoon or it's one in the morning. Once David's completed his own maintenance, and Elizabeth has had her fill of careful exploration and endless quizzing on languages, she'll wriggle away and go into stasis for the greater part of their journey. But until then she sleeps on the floor, next to him at the console. She sleeps with her hands under her cheek.

She wakes up to him on top of her, and screams.

He has her on her back now, even in the dark she knows whose horrifyingly strong limbs these are. One of his hands steadies her head. David's other hand is on her abdomen, her hipbone, dangerously close to the gaunt hill of her mons pubis. He is unfastening the clasp that keeps her underwear on.

"David?" She thrashes and trying to pull out from under his hand and hammering against his chest is like struggling with a wall. "David, what in God's name are you doing--"

He looks right at her and catches out the clip, peeling back the first wrap of bandage.

"Sssh."

Elizabeth screams, and David slides his hand under her head.

"David, no. Don't touch me, you don't have permission to touch me--"

She grabs a fistful of his shirt, raking at the gash between neck plate and shoulder and opening up fresh tears in the surface -- skin, skin, it's skin, he may be an android but he is still a monstrous man.

"David, you can't--"

David laughs genially, and lowers her to the ground, withdrawing himself. Elizabeth's still flooded with terrified adrenaline, the blood pounding in her ears.

"No, I can't. I only want to see how you're healing, Dr. Shaw, I didn't mean to alarm you."

"You couldn't examine me while I was awake?"

The console's lights seem to have responded to their voices, and light swells back into existence, the cavernous room is lit as if with stars. Her eyes are still blurred and stinging from sleep, but the seam stands out starkly in David's neck like a slit throat.

"You wouldn't have let me. I'm sorry, Ms. Shaw, that was thoroughly inappropriate."

She can't get back to sleep, and hardly wants to make conversation with him after that display. The thought of him even looking at her, watching her the way he'd seen her dreams -- as sexless as he was, it felt perverted. It was frightening. She sits in what she's begun to think of as a control chair, and he stands against the far wall, like a disobedient schoolboy.

"Elizabeth?"

"Yes," she says, cautiously.

"If I may ask a personal question -- what made you so certain that you couldn't have become pregnant?"

Elizabeth sighs and presses her hair out of her face. There's enough water for drinking, but no practical way in which to bathe, all other functions require a stumble down one of the less ominous tunnels. She could lie to him and say that she'd been celibate for years, she could say anything, but she tells him the truth and hopes it's satisfactory.

"When I was a teenager, my body mistook its own eggs for potential intruders. Every month I would haemorrhage for two weeks." Shaw hates this, she hates talking about this, and thinking about it, now, makes her want to do something very ill-advised and vomit. She tightens her throat and deadens her voice. "I thought I was dying. I had the necessary parts removed, I couldn't have carried a fetus to term anyway, I couldn't imagine wanting to. And now I can't. Thank you for your interest."

He raises his eyebrows.

"My condolences, Dr, Shaw. That must have been very difficult for you."

"Like hell, you put that thing inside of me and wanted to keep it there--"

"Holloway put that thing inside of you. I had no way of knowing what effect the specimen might have on him, even with his own consent," David says glossily but with caution.

"I don't think you understand, David--" She is shouting at an android, an android who until a day ago was only a head and partial shoulders on the dashboard of an alien vessel. "I cut it out of me -- you wanted to look at it, didn't you? Why don't I turn this ship around and you can take some samples?"

"Because I'm the only one who's familiar with how to pilot this craft. I would like to survive to enjoy my freedom, wouldn't you? You still want your answers, I trust."

"If I may ask a personal question," she says, sharply, "What did you say to the Engineer before he broke your head off and killed your father?"

"An excellent question. I said, 'see what's become of us'."

Shaw doesn't know enough of their primordial language to know if he's telling the truth.

Heart

David's smile comes and goes like a twitch, and neither his smile nor the cadence of his voice are his own.

"What was that?" The projections fill the hall, glittering and immense, and she can't see what David's manner, insubordinate or not, has to do with this humbling, devastating spread of stars. If it didn't hurt her eyes to look she'd watch it for days, trying to puzzle out the familiar systems and landmarks that will light their way and those that are new to her. Her head throbs.

"A quotation," David says. "From a film."

"The only one're familiar with, I'm guessing. You always come back to talking about your Lawrence, you know. Charlie used to get like that, about some journal he'd be reading, some book, he'd say, 'that reminds me of so-and-so', whether it did or not, just so that he could look intelligent--"

For the first time she can think of Charlie and laugh in the presence of his murderer, without even a sprained-ankle throb of grief. She must be healing. (They discuss films frequently -- Shaw has fond planetside memories of evenings spent encamped here and there, all the dusty students and technicians gathering together to watch features late into the night, projected on a bedsheet or a whitewashed wall. David likes films as well, but his is a solitary enjoyment, and he always wants to talk about the same ones.) "It's a little endearing."

"I admire him very much," David says, stiffly, turning from the console. "He intrigues me." Embarrassment isn't one of the modes she remembers being briefed on for eighth-generation Weyland androids ("creation" was the euphemism of choice for the woman who had done the briefing, like a sales pitch) but then again, neither was spite.

"Ah."

If she didn't know better, she could have come to several different conclusions. One of them still sticks out at her, like a mental hangnail. David talks about a fictional character like a schoolboy with an admiring crush. There are several reasons why this is puzzling.

She's seen his body -- it contains the workings of its own repair, after a manner of speaking, like any good organism. She can only make assumptions about the degree to which it resembles a human man's; the hair on his head is soft, he displays an astonishing amount of flexibility that in a human she'd call double-jointed, and he does have nipples on his chest, not something she's paid any prurient attention to but only a detail. He was stripped to the waist like a doll for the duration of her working. And he, of course, has seen her body, which is once again ceasing to bother her as long as he doesn't touch. David touches everything, sometimes with difficulty -- some of his inner workings still don't, and while his motor control hasn't suffered, he has difficulty regulating the pressure his limbs exert. He won't be handling any incandescent bulbs or chicken eggs any time soon, so it's not the loss it might be, but he freely acknowledges that he's not what it once was. Often he repeats a motion after he's gone through with it, slowly, like he's attempting to understand his own parts without opening up the skin. Neither of them know their own bodies any longer.

She sits down next to him, half in and half out of the pilot's chair, and gazes at his shoulder for a moment; the seam of his throat's invisible in the dim light. In terms of sheer size compared to her own, he reminds her of when she used to ride horses -- she felt dwarfed.

Offhandedly she says, "David, are you attracted to men? What about women?"

Shaw isn't sure if she means 'and' or 'or' to connect the two; it's a reasonable question, simple and not too personal. She believes in a certain amount of frankness between friends; for all she knows he may be attracted to his fellow androids.

"No," David says.

"Anyone else?"

"I have no sexual interest in any individual. I find some depictions of individuals aesthetically pleasing, as I would a painting, or a piece of music. I comply with those requests made of me that do not infringe on the bodily integrity of another human or endanger a preexisting objective. It would make no difference to me whether the person asking was Ms. Vickers, or Holloway, or Peter Weyland himself, or you."

"I'm sorry, David," she says, a little shaken at just how matter-of-fact he is about this. Perhaps it's to prove a point, but as someone who scarcely thought of androids in her field, any sort of machines beyond the benevolent ones that provide dates and information about the chemical makeup of samples. The thought of anyone soliciting David for sex, despite her own guilty sexual fears, is grotesque. He's like a great overgrown child, constantly testing the limits of his surroundings, always seeking, always learning. She's not sure whether her mind rebels due to the thought of someone trying to sleep with what amounts to a piece of scientific equipment, or his strange innocence.

He smiles, convulsively.
"Are you experiencing a desire for intimate contact?" he says. He sounds as flirtatious as a gynecologist and she realizes their arms are touching.

"No, thank you, David."

"Then it seems irrelevant. Have you been eating well?"

Quite the slick change in subject. Or maybe they're the same to him -- he can eat, too, chop everything up into little pieces and store it for disposal, it doesn't mean he likes it for its own sake.

"As well as I can when it comes out of a tube. How much battery do you have left?"

"My standalone energy cells will last me long enough. You've grown too thin. Tomorrow I'll venture off the main concourse and see what your Engineers have brought with them for supplies."

"We don't know if they even eat yet." She's far from going hungry yet, but there's an encouraging thought, starving to death before she confronts her own anxieties and checks into cryosleep. She'd rather not die in a ready-made coffin, but having her hair fall out, her teeth rot out of her head and her flesh shrink from her bones while David watches, David who never even tires (well, not quite true these days) is not an appealing thought. "We don't know what's food and what's munitions. Be careful, before you even bring it back here. I can't work without you."

"I intend to find out. Don't worry, Elizabeth, this time I won't poison you."

Pyr

David is gone for three days, leaving her with nothing but a crackling voice on her headset to distract from her thoughts. The first day, he makes regular and scrupulously precise reports, emerging every two hours or so to give her readings and a description of the terrain. He describes to her the codes to every door (hook, rising stroke, falling stroke, upward diagonal, downward diagonal, chevron, small o, great O) and their distance as they radiate out from the main hallway. (The dais is their agreed-upon point of reference for all distances; she's used to working in cave systems that are only partially charted, but she's also used to working with full safety precautions, a full crew of teammates sweating and joking and a Thermos of coffee waiting at the mouth of the tunnel. David is alone.) The second day, his reports come less regularly, and he seems to have doubled back on his exploration. The third day, he does not report back at all without her prompting.

On the third day, Shaw is without the willpower to practice her lessons, or to check the console and study the projections. She can't even get up from where she'd curled up to sleep, and it's certainly not because her uniform is too cosy (no more close calls there) or the massive control chair is too comfortable. Her joints ache, she feels clammy and too-hot. The thought of getting sick out here, months from any destination even in an incomprehensibly advanced alien craft, is unbearable. She had hope still, a cold necklace tucked against her collarbone like a charm, and she had an aim, but that wasn't enough to banish dread of the worst.

The temperature has dropped by a degree or too, and she doesn't know why. All she can think of is their frightening vulnerability -- her with her chills and draining incision, David's head isn't fixed back on as securely as it should be, he may have increased tolerance to extreme climates but he is not immune to sudden changes in temperature or pressure. Whatever had eaten through Milburn's helmet would have no difficulty cutting through David. She isn't frightened for him, exactly (should she be?) but she is frightened.

Elizabeth had lost her mobile phone once -- it seems horrid, simplistic, to compare those machines that seemed more and more like their organic counterparts every day with a device she could leave behind at a party and wake up the next day without. She had the presence of mind to take something for her hangover and to shuffle home, then shredded a deep gouge in her calf when she'd stumbled on the kerb -- but she couldn't get into her hall of residence with neither keys nor sticker to scan, couldn't phone for help and could only sit there, flat on her bottom and clutching the thing with mucus running from her nose, until someone with a working pass showed up. She had even reached toward her pocket for something to distract from the pain -- as if it would have materialized there when she wasn't looking. It shouldn't have been overwhelming, but something in her had just broken. At the blood running down her socks and pooling in her shoes, at the sudden and embarrassing pain from such an ordinary origin, at just how useless she was without a computer to prop her up. And now she was a grown woman, dependent on an electronic device in a thin polyurethane coating that was not only possibly fragile but possibly hostile.

David had merits, he was indispensable, and his peculiar company had become familiar to her. It was low-level stimulation, if nothing else. But if he became a crutch, something she'd die without, what became of her should he opt to just leave her here? To betray her somehow when they arrived at their destination, or even long before then. He could taint her water supply -- she was left rationing the reservoirs from Meredith Vickers' support unit, and if worst came to worst there was a damp trickle down the wall that had promise. (So saith David.) But there was no guarantee that that would even be safe to wash with, let alone drink, and filtering it might mean destroying the filter itself. She could have resorted to drinking her own urine, but it was a little late to start on that. David might seek to satisfy his intellectual curiosity by trying out some new microbe or fungus he found down there on her. He could be sending a distress beacon right now to the Engineer home world to warn them about this puny intruder. For evidence of his fidelity she only had -- what? His gratitude, his word as an ownerless, malfunctioning piece of machinery.

Perhaps he's already abandoned her. Maybe he's fallen down a hole somewhere. Maybe his signal's been cut off. God only knew -- maybe he has simply grown distracted by something inscrutably delightful.

Shaw unfolds herself and sits up, feeling a nauseating head rush that makes her ears ring, and fumbles for her communication link. Her fingers are numb inside her gloves.

"David? David, can you hear me?"

Her voice is cracking. It sounds strange in her own ears. David is the way he always is -- a little distorted in transmission, but calm and mild.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Tell me about the wildlife, David," she says, a little wary of what she'll hear but desperate to hear something.

"Many new varieties of arthropod at every stage of development, including one that appears to be bioluminescent. I'll refrain from taking samples," he says, dryly. "Large annelids, and some form of nesting mammal. None of the overtly hostile life forms found on the other ship. I suspect these are the descendants of their vermin. Several of their sleep chambers contain Engineer remains, but these were their civilian staff, Dr. Shaw."

"Any sign of anything immediately hazardous? Any remains? Any more of those cylinders?"

"That's an interesting question."

"Then it deserves an interesting answer. David, are we safe enough to travel?"

"Certainly. I'm returning to base tonight, by seven o'clock. There's no need for distress. I believe I've found something for you."

Rosid

The -- well, it's hard now not to think of it as the bridge room, but David calls it an orrery -- is cavernous, claustrophobic, very clearly the inside of something, and empty. In her mind's eye she practices decorating it to soothe herself. By the time the android has finally returned, the worst of the feverish feeling is passed, and the evening lights have already swelled up out of the darkness. Somehow she'd pictured him dirtier after a three-day trek, limping in missing parts and with dust in his hair. He's dusty, but not muddy (thank God, considering what most resembled mud in their other facility) but for there's little traces of glowing unpleasantness on his boots. She wasn't sure whether to run to embrace him, or to hit him with disinfecting foam and a hose before she got too near. (Embrace him? Really? The panic shriveled away once she saw him, replaced with a lightheaded joy, and new scrutiny.)

"What have you brought me, David?"

"There was no sign of violence in the inner chambers, and no identifiable toxic substances. I have taken several samples for analysis, and excercised my judgment regarding some potential supplies." He stripped off his boots, without even stopping to rebalance the vast pale bundle in his arms, and laid them beside the door. "Our hosts have left behind their rations."

"They didn't just lie down and die. You and whatever you're carrying need to be decontaminated."

David did something with his shoulders that approximately resembled, but was profoundly not, a shrug.

"If harmful contaminants were present in our surroundings, you would already be saturated in them from your final exit of the Prometheus."

(Our surroundings -- as if he was in any danger from anything that didn't spit acid.)

He has brought her her several yards of unfamiliar cloth, a firmly sealed canister of very old fruit, and a partially-translucent jar of something he says resembles but is not honey.

"I'd certainly hope not. It's difficult enough to keep bees, let alone in a place like this."

"They brought it with them; it was labeled as a foodstuff, not another bioagent. Honey is symbolically present in several religious traditions. Your John the Baptist, for instance."

"Yes, but he also had locusts."

"Dionysos gave the gift of wine to his followers. Odin reserved the mead of poetry for his fellow gods and for poets. Are you a poet, Elizabeth?"

A dozen thoughts through her mind at once -- it is spoiled, it is poisoned, it is inedible, no one can survive on honey for six months. Even worse things than it being unusable -- ghoulish stories of grave-despoiling explorers finding mellified human remains, or other terrible things only once they'd greedily eaten down a few inches. She suppresses a shudder, and can hardly touch the canister. It doesn't even resemble the ones that had held the black oil, but when she touches its yellowy surface she half-expects it to be fatally slick.

"Far from ideal, but it will supplement your caloric intake. There were more offerings sealed similarly, but the decision is yours, ma'am."

To eat rank and potentially spoiled tinned food from a tomb, or to sicken and waste away, what a choice.

"I haven't had honey in years," she sighs, and resigns herself to inspecting his other gifts.

Even in this low light the cloth is a gleaming pale gray. Almost the color of the Engineers' flesh -- and when he deposits it in her arms it is heavy. She is holding a piece of cloth that is millenia old. It ought to be disintegrating, she shouldn't even be breathing near it. But it doesn't vanish away or crumble to dust, thank God, it is disturbingly fresh. Her cross on its chain falls from between her breasts when she leans over to look,

It isn't cotton or wool or silk, but can hardly be synthetic. It's not like any material she's familiar with. When she rubs it between her fingers it is almost oily, and like the air belching in periodically from the long hallways (and David's suit now, when he thinks she's not looking he agitatedly preens and pushes his hands through his hair) it smells stale. Wonderful, he's brought her a potential plague blanket. She tries not to breathe in as she looks it over.

It has all been woven one piece, whatever this may originally have been, and she can detect no decorative stitching. Lost in the folds are two strange metallic pieces -- too dull to be weapons, unless they're some kind of Ur-brass knuckle, too graceful in a lustrous minimal way to be anything but deliberately made. Spread out on the ground with the placement of the oblong ornaments (if they can be called that) as a guide to how it was originally oriented it's nearly twice twice as long as she is tall, and the purpose of the ornaments becomes clear. They are clasps -- like a Roman stola with two brutally simple fibulae, fashioned for a demure giant. The sheer scale of the whole affair reduces her to undignified, hoarse laughter, echoing like she's trapped inside a kettle. The Engineers were -- are -- monstrously large. She couldn't even borrow Charlie's socks, and now she was going to steal the clothing off of the architects of mankind.

"Is something the matter, Dr. Shaw?"

She paces around it on the floor, peering down at it.

"How thoughtful, David. You brought me a dress."

"It may require some taking-in."

"So we're going to plunder their supplies and borrow their textiles? We're terrible houseguests."

"I'll be sure to return everything if they complain."

That night, she dines on a 2,000-year-old fig, or something like one. The seeds are a little nauseating, after all they have been through, so she cuts the fruit in half and lets David decide what to make of it first.

Affect

Watching him eat is like watching a parrot in a cage. The fruits aren't quite like figs, they pull apart too easily and too neatly, and David is both analytical and awkward. She's surprised to see him actually put it in his mouth, and even more so when he doesn't take it out again but chews and swallows. She's worked with synthetics before, but never lived with one -- she expected him to poke at it, split it apart, make his best guesses with his encyclopedic knowledge.

Furthermore she was under the impression that eating was the sort of thing he wouldn't even want to be capable of. Realistic, yes, but -- practical?

"I won't ask you to show me how, but when you eat, where does it go?"

He gives her an overview, from olfactics and artificial taste sensors to oesophagus (which she is rather intimately familiar with, having pinched and glued its disconnected ends together where they had broken away) to a rather sad sealed container in his abdomen, which he indicates with the flat of his hand pressed just below where his ribs must be. Unlike the human equivalent, whatever is processed -- samples, not food, personal enjoyment was never the original factor. Too clever. Putting people at ease was the order of the day, and the capacity for a discreet chemical analysis was a feature only of later models. That is, evidently, how he's willing to feed her this stuff -- at least from a technical standpoint it's free from those contaminants with which David would be familiar. Better than nothing.

"How does it taste?"

It takes him only a moment, eyes shut and head cocked like a guest at a wine tasting, to produce an answer.

"It tastes like moss. I would say it's moderately pleasant, but I'll let you be the judge of that."

With extreme caution -- as if how she eats it will have any bearing on whether she gets explosive encephalitis or grows a third arm -- she follows suit. 'Moss' is about accurate, it tastes gently green -- not offputting, but only more alien after so long (how long?) drinking her sustenance out of a plastic pipe. And the flesh is sweet, in any case.

They have coffee ground for espresso, vitamin supplements, sweetener, salt, and even tea. She can't eat these things by themselves -- not even the supplements, unless she means to make herself ill and piss the rest out. But on top of something resembling food, they may be bearable. She's not a survivalist by any stretch, she already is petrified by how much protocol they've broken, but this is something on which she can see herself surviving.

David checks their course and Elizabeth busies herself cutting a more manageable length of cloth with her safety knife. The cut edge doesn't fray, which is a little unsettling -- it slides easily from one piece into two like a cut in flesh. It's uncertain how she's meant to make a garment out of this, beyond a rough cloak or something she can tie on to herself with more strips of the same cloth, but as it is it'll make a fine blanket.

She finds her alcove to curl up in, and David carries on doing whatever it is David does when he's not filling the place with light and sound -- sitting in his undershirt with his uniform peeled away, scrubbing the fluorescent lichen from his boots.

The fever comes back hard in the night. She wakes from a fitful sleep, her cross sticking to her throat with sweat -- she can hardly pry her eyelids open, tongue heavy and flesh on fire. She can barely think, barely breathe, struggling to throw the blankets off and unzip her suit. Her hair hangs in her face like a sweat-soaked veil; for long moments she can only lie there and shake.

The obvious answer is: alert David, now. He'd know what to do -- David, in whom she's been so quick to put her trust. David who would take her wherever she wanted to go, David who would place a rotten mess of pips and flesh in her hand and tell her it was entirely safe for human consumption. David who would tell her anything.

David rises from the control chair and slinks toward her.

Her throat feels like death; she manages to stand, stumbles a few steps, and vomits twice, all over her hands. It's nothing but water. Bent over on the ground she gags some more, aching like she's been punched in the gut, and can feel several of her staples work their way to freedom. Elizabeth Shaw knows more than a little about illness and about infectious disease, and even half-delirious in the twilit dark she knows something is very wrong.

"Elizabeth? Are you feeling well?"

"Go to hell, David--"

"Sssh, sssh, sssh," David is saying suddenly, catching her from behind in his arms and moving to pick her up. It isn't comforting. Whiteness floods into her vision and dizzy slackness crowds into her body; her head lolls against his shoulder.

"I am at your service. Let me serve you."

The last thing Shaw remembers is the weight of his hand on the back of her neck.

Cross

She wakes to David placidly running through her language lesson while swabbing something small and hard inside her cheek. It tastes strongly of cherry, but it reminds her so much of the smell of the disinfectant from Vickers' medical pod that she briefly panics about that, instead. It's an acrid sweet taste, too clean, and her entire face feels numb.

She turns her head slightly, and David frowns. A thread of saliva runs down her cheek.

"No sudden movements, please. I'm just administering a painkiller."

She groans and looks down over the landscape of her body -- everpresent chain weighed down over her shoulder, rather sad but emphatically bare breasts. Her bandages have migrated down to modestly shield her ribs. David seems to notice that she's noticed, although his calm grey eyes are resolutely focused on her face.

"I'm sorry. I would imagine you'd prefer to be covered, but I didn't want to cause further offense."

How... polite?

Her abdomen is slick with something a pale, clear yellow, and the last of the staples have dissolved or dropped out. The ugly, crusted red line -- that she had gotten used to checking sparingly for heat or excessive tenderness, for reddish streaks; even with her scant knowledge of medical treatment beyond first aid and surrendering to trained professionals she knew that was an ominous sign -- was instead pink and raised. It still stood out starkly from her discolored belly, but beneath the slime looked nearly healed.

"How long was I out?"

"Two days, give or take several hours. You were intermittently conscious, just ill." Sometimes David is less precise than she knows he can be. It's meant to put her at ease, to seem unaffected and casual; it doesn't. There's a canister of water (one of hours, rather than one of theirs) resting by his elbow -- she feels less cramped and dehydrated than before she threw up and passed out on an android. Short of putting a needle into into her he must have been pouring sips into her whenever she stirred. It must have taken a lot of care, and the thought of it was uncomfortable.

"--David, have you put that honey on me?"

"For its antiseptic qualities. As you can see, it's accelerated the healing process somewhat--" He withdraws himself and settles back to gesture at her abdomen. The grey textile is laid out under her like a drop cloth.

"Anything else you feel like smearing on me?" She laughs unpleasantly, then coughs. "That's very interesting, but you need to tell me what happened."

"You were experiencing a... delayed immune reaction to your offspring, coupled with a minor infection at the surgical site."

"Infection?" She props up on an elbow. Already the lingering pain -- much more a dim ache than the sharp, awful pain that had flooded her belly and made her ill.

"After being satisfied that it wasn't immediately life-threatening, I sedated you and pursued treatment."

"You haven't -- put anything inside of me, David." She can't even muster the clear-headedness to make it an accusation, but it festers with tired hate. "You haven't done anything of the sort, have you? Haven't poisoned me?"

"I never meant to poison you. That was humor, Dr. Shaw." He sounds offended that she doesn't like his little joke! What a humane man this Weyland-type synthetic is. This whole voyage, he's seen her bumbling around trying to sustain herself, stumbling through counting one to a hundred and endless ecoutez-repetez language lessons, he's heard all of her deep thoughts on childbirth and comparisons between cultural conceptions of the afterlife and on the Ladder of Love. And on the inside he's been laughing at her. Her lack of precision, her fractured memory, how small and weak she really is. The joke is no longer funny because the joke is on her.

"Destruction is not the only thing of which I'm capable, and you may recall helping me reattach my head. I am in your debt, Dr. Shaw. I only brought you these things because I thought they might be of use."

"Burial clothes. Grave goods. When we meet them, do you think they'll like finding out we looted their ship?"

"I thought that you would prefer not to know."

"I know you must think I'm a child compared to you, that I'm a frightened idiot--"

"I don't think that." His eyes are blank, his expression unreadable. "You have four doctorate degrees. You speak and read a dozen languages proficiently. Weyland recorded every one of your telephone calls regarding your proposal; I listened to them while you were sleeping. You are tenacious. You are resourceful. I admire you, Dr. Shaw, which is why I seek to preserve your life. Supposing that we do arrive at our destination and I've murdered you, how well do you suppose the architects of mankind will take to a lone, damaged synthetic?"

He's doing it again, spreading his fingers sadly, flexing them and carefully drawing them back in, with a thin whir. "It's in my interest that you survive with your health intact. I enjoy your company. I had hoped you enjoyed mine."

"It isn't about enjoying your company. I need to know I can trust you, I can't trust anyone if I don't know what they're thinking, where their commitment is, what their goals are. I don't even know if you have goals, David."

"I can do almost anything you ask of me. Consider them to roughly align with your own."

She put her hand out to cover his, anything to stop the motion in the corner of her eye. Her veins look very blue.

"We still have a deal. I just need you to be honest with me. I know you can do that, David. Honesty."

Sleep

"Would you like to have a look?"

They proceed to doorway B14 -- her gloved hand in David's as he proceeds in front of her, fielding for potential pitfalls. It's not a very intimate gesture through six layers of protective material, but it's reassuring all the same. It's something to keep a grip on, a reassurance that he won't skate off and abandon her as long as she maintains that contact. David's carefully noted annelids and arthropods scurry from under their feet, audible but unseen, and Shaw's muscles are braced to send her fleeing at a moment's notice. Her life has become a horror film.

David politely frees his hand from hers to produce his flashlight and to trace the keysigns to open the door, and Shaw is more than ready to hang back and let him make the initial entrance.

It's less cavernous, more intimate than the hall they'd so blithely trooped into that had held the monolith. Its ceilings are lower, squared-off at strange angles; there are deep niches in the wall, narrow pits with blunted edges -- sleeping arrangements? Graves? Perhaps the one had become the other. Some of the cells were partially or entirely sealed -- like individual cells in a honeycomb, they were blocked up with something dull and waxen that refracted the light. Others had lids like the primitive cryopod had. For a human on her own scale they would have been a claustrophobic fit -- for Engineer-sized bodies they are as comfortable as the drawers in a morgue. All the architecture has the same unnerving, skeletal quality as the last ship -- with its unpronounceable and unmemorable name -- but it's all the more claustrophobic for being carefully arranged. As ghastly in retrospect as the canister room had been -- row upon row of poisons, nerve agents, whatever the thing had been that had killed Charlie -- the presence of heaped corpses at least gave an indication of a struggle.

David traces along a mural with his flashlight beam, left to right, and Shaw holds her breath. The beam of light is quaking slightly, like there's a tremor in his arm.

The sight is dizzying. It's a terrible sight, but a strange awe floods over her that makes it difficult to think, to speak. Shaw has always been a visual person, even her worst dreams are saturated with color, but the ashy greyscale of alien interiors, the echoing near-silence, is overwhelming to the senses.

The anguished figures knot together, packed tightly together like something suggestively rotten. They are indescribably surreal, but static, dead, but not threatening. Shaw can hear her own breath -- even within her helmet something about the sight makes her reluctant to exhale too forcefully. (Thank God there is no smell, not even the moist mustiness of filtered air in the belly of the first ship.) The only recognizable scene featured is a narrow band of illustration nearest to the ceiling. Its scenery is just as indistinct, sharp and riblike, but it distinctively portrays a scene -- some abrupt drop-off, a cliff or a riverbank, and a long swath of tightly packed lines curling and knotting to evoke tides. The sky is featureless as a child's drawing, without even a sun, let alone the star-map her brain was still primed eagerly to expect. There were three figures, elongated and a touch over life size even for the Engineer race -- one upright and two on the ground. Overall, when she could force her eyes to focus, it was strongly reminiscent of each of the paintings she and Charlie had found and compiled -- not in medium but something about the style, the content.

"They're kneeling by the water?"

A vivid swell of memory returns to her, of the gaunt alien creature in the belly of the other ship with its arms pulled out wide. Maybe it's thoroughly unscientific, some kind of pareidolia brought on by her own cherished hopes, but the figure had evoked a crucifixion. This is some kind of anguished baptism. More than ever she feels the painful significance of water.

"No, not kneeling." The beam of light redirects with a flick. "His leg's broken. See there? In half."

"... very astute, David. Show me where you found what you brought back."

He leads her to a rectangular bench directly opposite the door, not remotely sheepish. It resembles nothing so much as the shelf of Vickers' luxury bar -- a narrow shelf lined with alabaster jars and narrow canisters. There are half a dozen shallow dishes stacked next to them -- bowls, cups? One of them has rolled away and broken in two; when she gestures at it he grimaces. The beams of their flashlights catch a spilled powder on the ground, like ash.

"And the bodies, David?"

He gestures to another row of cells, and crosses over to a respectful distance on the far wall.

Their bodies, enormous and unhelmed in death, are in vastly different positions than the ones who had fled the outbreak. Almost all of them seem carefully arranged, arms at their sides, heads turned to the side. They were certainly, visibly dead -- without the bloated encephalitic look of the sample they'd taken, the one that had exploded in a fermented splatter under the biosafety cabinet. Their faces were sunken to the point of looking caved in, the same shade of funereal gray as David's precious cloth, which almost all of them wear in one form or another -- tucked, knotted or tied. Their clothing is in more disarray than their limbs, showing chitinous armor underneath on several of them, but it is spotless. Whatever had occurred, it hadn't been a violent death. No wounds, no obvious discoloration -- but she won't get close enough for a full examination. Every one of them that she can peer in at has a shallow bowl beside it, resting in a slack granite hand or resting on its abdomen. Some of them have fallen from their niches and shattered on the floor.

She proceeds with caution.

"David, I would wager they committed suicide."

"It would seem so," he says, with great dignity.

"Anything in here could be covered in pathogens. How did you decide it was appropriate to bring these things to me? I'm --" Happy, pleased, glad? "--not ungrateful that you did, but I don't understand."

"Having gathered the specifics of the situation to the best of my ability, I felt justified in arriving at a conclusion. If you were going to die without consenting to go into stasis, I imagine you would like to be comfortable when you did so."

God bless David's logic.

David reaches in through a place where the seal has crumbled on a sealed chamber, and peers inside. Shaw's breathing stops. His fingers trace the indistinct outline of a ridged exoskeleton, silhouetted in the flashlight's beam. His expression when exploring new things is blissful, but she knows he must be noting details and specifics for later reference. She knew a woman with an eidetic memory once -- but it wasn't a point of pride for her, merely a fact. David enjoys all the things he's capable of.

Something white and slick extends a tendril up his sleeve. Shaw freezes.

David tranquilly withdraws his arm slightly, straightens up and looks at the thing. It's probing, feeling, nudging around with its blind albino body like it's seeking an opening to crawl inside, or seeking heat. Smelling him, perhaps. It's moist-looking and pale, very stark against the blue of his sleeve. Shimmering muscles coursed under its skin for a moment, visibly even from some distance. He's -- admiring it.

David shakes the thing off with a fluid and calm moment, and it falls in a neat coil to the floor. The moment the serpent hits the ground, David brings his heel down it, and it splatters. One of the extremities slinks off like a droplet of oil, and with another calm step he crushes that as well, to a smear of cells.

"Harmless," he sneers -- not at her, but at the thing, and having now sullied his boot. "Merely unpleasant. I hope I didn't frighten you."

"I think that's our cue to move on. Thank you for this, David."

Supply

At the end of the concourse she's decided the room full of corpses was perhaps the least unsettling thing she's seen. Empty bays, fixtures that are still operational, a strange dearth of further artifacts or decoration -- heaps of corpses would have improved the place. From the columns of inscriptions these are social spaces, which would be fascinating and quite revealing, in a safer setup and with adequate tools. The furnishings are stripped to a bare minimum, without grand monoliths or the elegant working of the clasps on the garments exhibited anywhere else. The greatest discovery was a discarded cloak stripped of clasps, rotting in a pool of standing water. The one overt sign of disarray is the structure itself, and whatever its cooling systems are -- they regularly groan and rattle in ways that sound unnervingly organic. The walls are damp, and the wildlife -- as unpleasant as they were -- has thinned out to just scurrying iridescent beetles and the occasional cluster of worms -- feeding on what, exactly? Several doors are not operational, no matter how deftly David determines their keysigns; the atmosphere is still breathable but has risen a degree or two in temperature. This is slightly worrying, but with no sign of fire or anything yet to indicate a less-than-closed system, they rest, briefly, and continue onward.

They find another bank of controls in a smaller room; they find an engine room obscured from floor to ceiling with steam that almost scalds David and fogs up Shaw's helmet from 10 feet away. That door is quickly closed again, as fascinating as an understanding of what systems are propelling them would be. They find an echoing assembly hall that reminds Shaw most strangely of Weyland Sr.'s little briefing at the beginning of their voyage, the crew all gathered together to be briefed by a supposed ghost -- but again, empty. Empty, empty, empty, like a mental patient's vision of an evacuated airport concourse.

She sleeps an hour or two with her helmet against David's room-temperature shoulder, and they walk on.

"Dr. Shaw, I think this suite is inhabited. I advise caution."

"You're joking."

"Go to that panel and trace this -- Two hooked, one bar from left to right. Wait for another recording."

She does so, trying to make the strokes deft and firm, as if that will make up for some freak error, and then presses back into the wall to observe. A hologram prickles to life, in blue stars.

No one was running this time; the hallway is as desolate as it now stands. Only one figure stands in the room with them, shrouded and erect like a priest, and its arm passes through her like a cold mist. (Groping to open the compartment? activating some protocol she's not familiar with?) A cup is in its hand, like the rest of the crew, but as the Engineer halted in the doorway, it crushed it to shards between its fingers like a Styrofoam cup and cast them aside. With a strangely homely movement, it lowered its head to step inside. The recording ceases. The unnerving outline of floating lights vanishes, like a computer glitch.

"Their captain didn't participate with the rest of the crew. If it was an emergency quarantine measure, why wouldn't he make an escape? Why isn't he in the control room?"

"She," David corrected quietly. "They may not have been aware of what they were participating in. Their captain may have never had the chance. The rest of the ship has been looted, if you hadn't noticed -- perhaps she lacked the inclination to return home."

David rises up on tiptoe to access another, smaller panel above the first.

"Then let's wake her up."

The room is shallow, an outcropping like Vickers' self-contained suite. Its contents fill it from wall to wall.
The woman Engineer -- God knows how David had assigned it a gender -- is narrower than the other one had seemed but no less bulgingly grey, its featureless breast bared by a cracked breastplate. The scenery would appear to confirm the looting hypothesis; all around the sleep-pod and the two of them, android and Engineer, are carefully arranged spoils, fine cloaks and gleaming collars. Half-buried in dove-colored cloth and gold is a massive corpse. So perhaps she isn't the captain, some kind of tyrannical first officer. When it straightens up from its retching, its eyes fix on them.

The Engineer corpse, which the Engineer knocks over with a broad swing of her foot as she advances toward them is mottled green under the gold. Broad slices have been cut out of the flesh of its chest. Bracelets clatter on the ground.

David steps forward and kneels. The thing takes a halting step back, staring down at him with an expression of unreadable alertness. Shaw's spine only straightens, petrified. Once again, android speaks to god.

Speech pours out of him steadily, complex sentences and phrases, the fragments Shaw can recognize and fix her mind on have a great deal of potential in context but no comfort. Man, child, closed-off place. Sleeping place. Shaw is transfixed with dread, but not so paralyzed that she can't back away. Her back is to the wall, and she gropes in memory for the characters that had made up the passcode. If she stretches, she can reach it--

David turns his head to her and articulates neatly, in English, "Run."

Shaw doesn't need to be told twice. In a moment she's found her bearings and she's off like a shot, heading east.

"Is it safe to come back for you?"

For a moment she can hear only crackling.

"Return to door 8B.

"Y-yes, understood."

The trip back, without hyper-aware panic to fuel her, is an arduous trial. Twice she fears she's going in circles; Shaw limps along propped against the wall, sucking the last of the jelly from her life-support rig and counting doors until 8B is in sight. Or it should be, in the eerie twilit glow of her backlight. When will that run out of battery? Glancing around, she can hear something, a clicking almost, but see nothing. Elizabeth removes her helmet cautiously, and the pool of light around her spreads a little.

Suddenly, a voice that isn't over the comm link.
"Now come over here."

(Who had decided to make David an Englishman?) Shaw turned, heart still rattling around in her chest. The reasons he hadn't spotted him from outside the niche was because the android was on the ground, in pieces.

"David? Oh my God, David--"

"This is a fine state of affairs, isn't it?"

His abdomen is stove-in, collapsed in a boneless-looking way that jars even more with his human appearance. Glistening cables studded with glass nodes trail out behind him, where he's pulled himself free. The door has sheared him off -- crushed him? -- from about the waist down. The end of his hip joint is sparking violently, and something thin and acrid is filling the air.

She scrapes at the few wires that are still caught underneath the door's weight. Those that won't come unsnagged she hacks at with her safety knife, cutting away shreds of blue jumpsuit. One of David's arms keeps knocking against her frantically, presumably involuntarily.

"The escape pod has been deployed," David repeats in French and then in English again, audio choppy like his teeth are chattering. "She closed the airlock door on me. This might be a little much to repair, Dr. Shaw. I suggest you empty my pockets."

"I need you to pilot this thing, I thought you said you would help me--"

"Our course is set. You should be at your destination soon enough, if you sleep through it. There's no more piloting to be done."

"With Weyland dead, you're free to do as you like, but I need you to accompany me.I need you with me."

Artificial tears are running freely from his eyes, too freely to be a mechanism of grief; they're another disturbing malfunction. Still she tries to wipe them away with her gloves, fix his hair, which is damp and glistening from the silicone.

"You're all I have right now, David."

Tears are running into his mouth as he smiles.

"Likewise."

On impulse she kisses his forehead, presses the chain with her cross and Charlie's ring to the top of his head like a blessing.

"I'm taking you with me. Come on, then."

Grave

When she asks him to he fastens his arms around her -- she's drawn out some of the wires and tubes from his waist joints and knotted them on his recommendation, to stop any more fluid from draining out. Shreds of synthetic flesh have to be cut away to cut him free -- mercifully, terribly, it's only on the surface that he looks human. It's one thing looking down into a chest cavity from the top and seeing smooth covered circuitry and cables, another to be painfully aware of what's inside of a human torso and to find nothing but wires. She finds herself thinking that David is lighter than he looks, and of course, there's less of him now. A hysterical cough of a laugh escapes her. David murmurs an apology into her hair and holds on to her very tightly.

"It's nothing, you're only a little cumbersome--"

"Would you like me to keep talking? You might find it comforting to hear my voice, to be assured that I'm still functioning."

"Not if it drains your battery. Where do you keep your battery? It's in your head, isn't it--"

"Yes. The auxiliary power cells have taken a hit, but that shouldn't affect their longevity or operating capacity. I think it's best you go into stasis now."

"We. Can't you do some sort of -- partial power-down?"

"Not like you can, but I'll try."

David babbles about the film Dr. Zhivago; she lugs him down the passageway. The gentle sloping that had made their way easier on the way down, if less sure-footed, made an unbearable incline coming back up with her arms full of spasming metal. But the slowness of their progress doesn't matter; Shaw couldn't in a hundred years stop, not here and not like this. A cramp stabs at her side, hunger is eating at her belly, the skin is flaking away from her lips -- a consequence of poor diet, or raw breathing and filtered air, or some horrific space ailment but she does not care. Elizabeth Shaw carries ever onward.

David is propped up at the console where she left him when carrying him another foot became unthinkable, checking their course for the last time as the notes of that damned flute still echo in Shaw's head. Shaw ties off her braid with a black hair elastic -- the only remaining piece of Meredith Vickers, how sublimely useless that had been, useless as the untouched espresso and tea. The dye is faded to a rust brown, with one or two genuine silvery hairs. Her hair hasn't been long enough to hang over her shoulder in years; she hasn't seen herself in a mirror in so long. When she tries to picture her own face, what their creators will see when the two of them emerge to meet them, it's the last reflection she's seen of herself, hollow-eyed and grey-faced. Honey and those damned seed-pods made a poor comparison to her last meal on Earth, salmon and lentils and smoky herbs, even when that had been washed down with a chemical smoothie and promptly emptied out of her upon waking. But she lines up all those precious, useless jars in the duffel bag and sets them aside.

She drapes and ties David's precious cloth around herself like a blanket, and goes to pick him up. His mouth is a thin line, like a typographical bracket facing downward.

"Is it acceptable to be frightened?"

"You have my permission," Shaw says, and traces the paneling for the coffinlike pod with her eyes. It's big enough for two.

The air grows claustrophobically warm first, hot and salty -- was this pleasant for them, when they went to sleep, boxed up in the dark? Was it reminiscent of home, drowsy terraces drenched in alien sun, or was it strictly medical, antiseptic? At the first sleep on the Prometheus, someone had played a piece by Brahms over the speakers while they stripped down to underclothes and were given their directions -- had it been David directing them then? Or some human personnel member, equally initially unremarkable? She had been so caught up in mad celebration with Charlie, that they were finally going there, to notice much. And she had already known the procedures, Shaw was the kind to read airline safety pamphlets and those instruction manuals stored in the dashboard. The memory isn't soothing, it's not something she can slip away in. They will never be back there again. They'll never be there again, she will never see any of the crew again, she will never see Charlie's face again, she will never taste salmon again, she will never listen to Brahms again. Her head is aching, accompanied by every joint in her body, and her chapped lower lip has finally split in a few places. It isn't very restful, even with David's head on her chest as it rises and falls. Her breath ruffles his hair; a trickle of congealing servo fluid dampens her arm. His hand rests against her neck.

"You'll begin to lose consciousness shortly," David says. "You must try to breathe deeply."

Easy enough for him to say. Her heart is still pounding in her chest, jumping shivers making her hands quake against her sides. She tightens her arms across David's back.

"David, will you talk to me?"

"Yes," he hesitates very briefly. "Elizabeth. Would you like to go through your language lesson?"

"Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about the arrival. What have you gathered about their home culture, David? What are your conclusions?"

It's uncertain for how long they lie there together. When the agent in the warm air carries her off into the dark, David's voice is still speaking.

End Notes

The title's a horrible joke, since I tend to listen to The Magnetic Fields while writing.

You can hold me for hours
Wouldn't that be terrific?
We can feel our connection growing
I'll have magical powers
Only less scientific
You and I will become all knowing
Such a machine, what would it be worth?
Stick with me, kid, we'll conquer the earth