She had watched him discreetly through the briefing, fleeting sideways glances to scrutinize his face, a fragment at a time. A cold, dull, dead thing without comprehension, idiot smile and hands folded, and then a flinch -- then a recognition, that he is not such a treasured thing after all. Not so precious. Her father's words came as no surprise to her, and as such hardly hurt. David was family for her as well, wasn't he, I hope you'll come to see him as... As a brother? As a fellow prisoner in this purgatory state, answering to a superstitious old man in a coma. David is here to help her, to assist her. What a blessing, a man she needn't fear. Endlessly loyal, infinitely faithful -- but not to her. She wonders what his orders will be at the end of the mission, if they achieve their objective on a dirty poisonous distant rock. To self-terminate, the tidy destruction of a loose end once they've come away with what they came for. Or to dispose of the spare.

If Peter Weyland gets the life he's looking for, Meredith Vickers will never be free as long as she lives. She supposes David won't either, but she doesn't care.

"David, take your shoes off." And he does.

"David, help me undress." And he does.

His hands are light on her shoulders; she shrugs out of her tailored jacket and he smooths it before setting it aside over the edge of the couch. Weyland even dresses them alike. Her uniform of pearl-gray and white is strictly company dress policy, sleeker and more expensive than anyone in the divisions she oversees. It's never occurred to her to change her ways when off the clock. This is her struggle; no part of her is left to be civilian.

David kneels before her and draws one outlandishly expensive high heeled boot off of her, then another. As attentive an inferior as one could hope for; she has the momentary thought of him prone on her office floor, the heel of her shoe driven against his throat, what patient biomechanical routines the David 8 would run through in place of animal fear. What would happen in his eyes? What would happen to his lips, his neck, the infuriatingly regular rise and fall of his chest? She can't say it's not an appealing image. Meredith won't look at him; she reaches for the remote and gestures at it to queue up music, to banish the cycling images that characterize a waiting computer screen and call up the backdrop of a cityscape, stark ice and silver. It's something like home, but the streets are too clear and the sky too clean.

This moment between them might be intimate, but Meredith knows precious little about intimacy; it is not an experience she puts much of a premium on. She parts her legs slightly, unfastens her pants and lets David peel them away. It's unpleasantly like being an invalid, but his murmured apologies and real shame when his broad hands happen to graze her naked thigh make it worth it. When the time comes to peel off her $80 panties, that she does herself, baring toned flesh and hard planes and tender places that hardly seem to fit her. David's internal components are gleaming titanium and cadmium and copper and gold, underneath the hardy veil of flesh. Elegant metals, precious and wrought well. Who wouldn't prefer it to a person? To a woman made out of meat and bones and tendons and inconvenient blood. For decades she has been punishing this body of hers, making it stronger and harder and colder than anything so fragile as flesh. Vickers must always be better than her body, it is an obstacle she must overcome. David is his material.

Her fingers press through his stiff blond hair, and David lowers his head to let her do so more easily, or perhaps he flinches. She digs in to seize him by the hair and pulls up, nails gouging clean runnels into synthetic flesh.

"You answer to me, David. Understood? To me."

"Of course, ma'am."

"I am going to give you a series of simple orders, and you are going to follow them."

She does not loosen her grip, but presses his face against her thigh. Her hand rests on the back of his neck; perhaps if her manicured nails dig in deep enough she can pluck out the wires and snap the tubing that runs through him, pull out the whole artificial spinal column, see how well he can keep his much-vaunted upright posture without a steel backbone to keep him up.

"Ah," David says, dully. No exhalation of breath, only the hard bones of his cheek and jaw against her skin.

Soon David is beneath her where he should be, and she sits astride, uncomfortably perched on his long thighs. She schools her face into a mask of command, as dispassionate as his own, while he gazes up and watches. Of course he's frosty. The bluff and the actuality are indistinguishable, they can't be picked apart when every smile and frown is entirely fabricated; there's no need to pull aside the façade when the façade is all there is. She will break it down.

Another finger, she orders. Now three.

The pain means it's working. The pain means that she is still human, and that David is not.

David is hard for her, at her command, whether he likes it or not, and he certainly doesn't like it. She sinks down on his cock and shuts her eyes as the head slips in, the complete length of it,

Here the commands stop. No 'deeper', no 'harder', just her riding on him, a convenient thing. An object conveniently designed to fuck herself with. Meredith sweats, slick and too-hot, and David is cold and dead and murmuring to her, to himself. Yes, ma'am, are you comfortable, here, very good, yes, ma'am, thank you. Thanking her, while she wrings out two slept-away years' worth of sexual frustration and stewing anger in as direct a fashion as possible. It's really too bad he can't understand what this means to her, the depth and breadth and heat of her dislike. Her eyes are closed, her back arched against the secure grip of hands that are not hands; she doesn't need sight to know her way around this landscape, the contours of hard belly and hipbone and cock. David cannot help but perform, to participate and obey. If it were up to her, he wouldn't even have a name.

Face to face, they are well-matched. (What kind of father builds a surrogate son and then puts so much attentive care in making him able to fuck?) She presses her thumb against the hard place in his throat where an Adam's apple should be, then a little to the right of it, and squeezes. Her other hand braces behind his head -- her hips thrust down with bruising force, her cunt spasms tighter around his obtrusive rigidity and sends off ripples of too-strong pleasure, like shockwaves. It's hardly sex, even as she slams him in deep inside herself, even as her grip tightens on his make-believe windpipe -- the physical gratification on her end is all coming from inside her head. (She hasn't had anything between her legs that wasn't made from silicone and steel in five years. Why break the habit?) Call it an aggressive method of communication.

David's grey eyes -- Pantone 428, the swatches for it are in an envelope in her desk drawer -- rest on hers. In his eyes, something registers, something is comprehended to its fullest. His passive face splits into a vicious smile, beautiful and white and terrible.

Hate is something the David 8 can understand. Meredith Vickers makes herself understood.

"I will find the cord that powers you and cut it."

When cornered he no longer knows how to carry himself. This protocol is absent -- he hasn't told Weyland, he wouldn't. That she trusts. Her fingers trace down his profile, the chiseled features that she has seen in their every variation, from all angles and in all attitudes. Handsome, in a dull sort of way. His eyes drop, modestly, like he's recognized something.

There will be no kinship between them, not this time. He won't overcome her in this. This is her struggle, and she intends to win it.