“Tell me one more time.”
Chad sighed. It was almost midnight and they’d been talking for nearly twelve hours now. At least they had managed to secure a couple of rooms in an apartment block close to where the heavy plant machinery was digging out the trench for the fabled recreation of the River Thames that was to be the New Albion centerpiece. Chad wasn’t sure he could have spent a night in that horrible concrete edifice called The Ritz.
“OK,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “So we start with what we call the Ovomorph—”
“Egg,” Cher said, writing it down on a big legal pad for the umpteenth time. “And these are laid by the Queen, and these things can stay inanimate for… how long?”
“Generally until a potential host approaches. At which point the egg’s four lobes at the top will open…”
“And out comes the face-hugger.” Cher nodded and made more notes. “And this thing attaches itself to its host, sticks a breathing tube down its throat, and impregnates it.”
“Right,” Chad said. “And this is why we get variations in the Xenomorphs. The relationship is more symbiotic than just parasitical. There’s an adoption of the host’s DNA to help the creature grow. You can’t get the face-hugger off without killing the host, but once it’s done its job it’ll detach itself and die.”
“Like a bee after it stings you.”
Chad watched Cher’s face wrinkle up as she made notes. He was so used to living his life with Xenomorphs, he’d forgotten what it was like when people discovered them for the first time. Usually that was very quickly followed up by running and screaming and death, so it was refreshing to be able to sit down and talk almost calmly about the creatures.
Cher was just the first step… if everything went according to plan, the entire human race would be hearing about the Xenomorphs through her journalism. They would no longer be the dirty little secret in the shadows. They would be in the full glare of a thousand suns, and instead of fighting its petty little wars and skirmishes, humanity would have something against which to unite…
The aliens, and those who would exploit them.
“And how long does the next stage take?” Cher asked. “The… chestburster?” She paused. “I must say, for scientists you’ve given these things very media-friendly names.”
“Anything from an hour to a day to a week,” Chad said. “It varies considerably depending on the host and the Queen that laid the Ovomorph, and other factors related to environment and the DNA reflex process.”
“But eventually…” Cher put her hands to her chest and aped an explosion with them. “Boom.”
“Boom,” Chad agreed. “And then the fun really starts, and by fun I mean killing.”
Davis was sitting on the rug, watching the video screen with interest. The New Albion Broadcasting Company had hours and hours of ancient British television footage, going back to the mid-twentieth century. Davis had tuned in to the comedy channel. Chad had been trying to teach him about humor, something Davis felt he sorely lacked, but it was so subjective… Davis was trying to understand, but Chad realized he simply couldn’t understand why something was meant to be funny.
Maybe it was that, and not love, that was the gulf between AI and human. One that was just too wide to ever be bridged.
“Can I interrupt?” Davis said.
Chad and Cher both looked at him. “Sure,” Cher said. “You have something to add about the chestburster stage?”
“No. I am curious about something.” He turned back toward the screen. “Why is this funny?”
They all looked. There was a man gesticulating at another man in a shop that sold animals. The first man was complaining that a parrot he had bought from the second man was dead. Chad vaguely knew what this was, in the same way he had a vague understanding of Shakespeare’s plays and Beethoven. Something from long ago that people thought was classic, but which nobody really had any frame of reference for anymore.
“The parrot is dead,” Davis said. “Why is that a source of humor? Is it not tragic? And how did the man purchase a bird and only discover it was not alive when he got it home? I’m not seeing the logic here.”
“Don’t ask me.” Cher shrugged. “I never got British comedy ever.”
Chad thought about it. “I think it might be more about the delivery than the content. This stuff was meant to be absurdist anyway, as far as I can tell.”
Davis nodded, licked his nose, and turned back to the program.
“So,” Cher said, picking up her pen again. “Boom.”
“The Xenomorph is at its most vulnerable then. Most killable. It’s only maybe a foot tall. Weak. It’ll immediately take itself off to hide, and grow.”
“And this takes…?”
“Hours to reach maturity, and an adult Xenomorph can be anything from two meters tall when fully extended. That’s for a drone. The most common type. Depending on the DNA reflex, it might be a Praetorian, twice as big and twice as nasty. You draw a Queen from the genetic deck, then you’re really talking. Six meters tall, more than double that from tail to pharyngeal—”
“Spell that, please,” she said. “And that is…?”
Chad did, and then made a fist and put it near his mouth, as though kissing the top of his wrist. Then he snaked his arm forward, his hand opening and closing like a claw in Cher’s face.
“A secondary mouth that extends from the first. The primary weapon,” he said. “Along with their prehensile tail, their claws, and the acidic blood.”
Cher put her pad and pen down and rubbed her face. “You do, of course, realize how batshit crazy this all sounds?”
There’d been many a time over the past few years Chad had wished he was crazy, and all this was some kind of fever dream. It was a lot to take in.
“Let’s leave it for tonight,” he said. “It’s late. We can talk some more tomorrow.”
“You’ll tell me about Amanda Ripley?” she replied. “And Zula Hendricks?”
Chad caught Davis looking over his shoulder. He said carefully, “Their stories need to be told—they’re a big part of this whole thing—but we have to be careful. Zula’s in a lot of danger out there. She’s made a lot of enemies. We have to tread lightly to avoid putting her in the crosshairs, any more than she already is.”
“And Amanda? She’s in danger too?”
“Tomorrow.” Chad stood up and yawned, and stretched. “You take the bedroom. I’ll have the couch. There’s still a lot to go over before you write your story.”
Cher stood also and grabbed her bag. “There’s more than going over old stories that needs to be done before I write a single word,” she said.
“Such as?”
“You seem genuine, Chad, and you’re very convincing, but you could still just be a crazy guy with an agenda.” She dragged her case over to the door of the small bedroom, off the lounge. “You know what needs to happen. I need to see one of these things. With my own eyes.” Then she continued through. “Goodnight, Chad. Goodnight, Davis.”
When the door closed behind her, Davis rolled onto his back and looked for a long time at Chad.
“Obviously you knew this was going to happen.”
Chad nodded. “I was hoping it wouldn’t, though. Cher Hunt obviously has balls of steel, but she’s not going to be much use to us dead, is she?”
* * *
Cher knew she wasn’t going to get much sleep. Not after all that. She lay in the uncomfortable bed, listening to the sounds of construction on the Thames ditch. It seemed like they were going to work all through the night.
Chad McLaren’s story sounded just too incredible to even consider believing, but she’d made him go over the details four, five, six times. Not a word or fact out of place, even when she’d tried to catch him out by playing dumb and repeating something back to him with slight variations an hour after he’d said it.
He corrected her every time. Either the guy was a consummate actor, or an actual psychopath, or…
Or he was telling the truth. In which case these things, these Xenomorphs, were the real reason the inquiry into the Hasanova incident had been such a whitewash. Captain Kylie Duncan hadn’t just gone rogue, she’d been working to another agenda. And Shy had died for it.
To keep it quiet. To cover it all up.
If it was true, then her sister had seen these things. Up close. Even now, and hating herself deeply for it, Cher felt a pang of jealousy. Shy had seen these monsters. These aliens. Shy was always the bold one, the adventurous one, the get-things-done one. Cher wrote about people who were bold and adventurous and got things done. That was the difference between them. Shy was a doer. Cher was a spectator.
“You fucking bitch,” she said out loud, to herself. “Your sister is dead, and you still can’t let this thing go.” Cher closed her eyes, willing sleep to come. Listening to the sounds of New Albion. And something else. Something hard and brittle and skittering. She sat bolt upright in bed, her mind filled with face-huggers and chestbursters and—
Davis. The dog was pawing at the door until it swung open, and stood there, framed in a square of light from a street lamp thrown through the undraped window in the living room.
“Do you mind if I sleep in here?” Davis said. “Chad snores awfully, and I can’t get comfortable on that rug.”
“Sure,” Cher said uncertainly. She patted the bed, then felt a little stupid and self-conscious. It’s a talking robot dog. “Jump on.”
Davis leapt up on to the bed and padded in a circle then curled up beside Cher. They lay there in silence for a moment.
“You know,” Cher said, “I’m not sure how comfortable I am with this. I mean, you’re basically a man in a dog’s body, right?”
“I’m flattered that you think that. I was created as a combat synthetic. My purpose was to fight, but I was made with a flaw… free will. Self-autonomy, and with that came a desire to be more than what I was born to be.” There was a moment of quiet, then Davis said quietly, “Ms. Hunt—”
“Cher. Please.”
“Cher. What do you think makes humans human?”
She thought about it for a long while, listening to the rumble from the construction site. “Well, it’s not an appreciation of comedy, I think we’ve established that. Maybe love?”
“I have loved,” Davis said, his dog jaws suddenly yawning. “I do love.”
“Zula Hendricks?” Cher guessed.
“It is perhaps not conventional love,” Davis said, “but it is what I understand love to be. A need to nurture and protect that overrides all else. A desire to be with her above anyone.”
“You’re lucky, then,” Cher whispered. “I’ve never felt like that. Maybe you are human after all, Davis.”
“No. I’m not. Not yet. There’s something missing, some vital ingredient lacking. It is as though… as though I am a perfect forgery of the Mona Lisa, but the smile is slightly off.”
Cher thought about Shy, about the reason she was here in the first place. About that day on the grain silo. Something changed between them at that very moment, something broke and snapped. “You let me down.” It was awfully heavy shit to lay on an eight-year-old, and Cher knew that Shy hadn’t ever seemed to really think about it afterward, certainly never mentioned it. But it stuck with Cher.
“Perhaps…” she said slowly in the dark. “Perhaps what makes us human is the willingness to sacrifice ourselves for those we love. And if we have the chance and don’t, to be haunted by it forever.”
“I have made sacrifices, Cher. I have been a nuclear bomb. I have been a spaceship. I have been lost in the depths of the ocean. All for her. And always I found her again.”
Cher felt sleepy, suddenly. “Is it real sacrifice, though, if you know you aren’t going to die?”
Davis was quiet for so long that Cher thought he’d gone to sleep, or whatever synthetics did. Put himself in standby mode. Begun to recharge. She realized she didn’t know much about synthetics at all. She’d met one or two, but never for any great length of time. She’d assumed them to be just machines, no more aware than her watch or phone, but in human form. There was something disquieting about Davis’s almost-humanity, more so because he was currently a damned dog.
“I never knew I would survive any of the incidents,” Davis said slowly. “I… hoped I would.”
“Hope,” Cher murmured. “There’s your humanity right there.” She rolled over to face the wall. “Maybe you’re asking the wrong person, Davis. I’ve spent my life watching, interviewing, writing about and reporting on humans, and I’m no closer to knowing what makes us tick. What separates us from animals, really? What separates us from the goddam Xenomorphs?”
“Xenomorphs exist only to reproduce, kill anything that threatens them, and spread themselves across the universe.”
“So,” Cher said, yawning. “Nothing really separates us at all, then.”
* * *
She must have fallen asleep because she woke up with a start, a warm, round patch of flattened blankets on the bed beside her where Davis had slept and recently vacated. So synthetics—synthetic dogs, at least—had body heat.
Then it registered.
Chad was hammering on her door and calling for her to come quick.
“What’s up?” she said, yawning and stretching in her vest and shorts as she walked into the living space. “Coffee. We have coffee, right? I need coffee.”
Chad led her to the big monitor in front of which Davis was already stationed, sitting up, alert, his tail wagging.
“Who’s that?” Cher said, pointing at the figure on the screen, a stout, ruddy man wearing an ill-fitting suit and looking seriously out from under a shock of blond hair.
“Maurice Pepper. The prime minister of New Albion. He’s making an emergency broadcast.”
Pepper shuffled some papers at the lectern which bore the crest of the colony, and coughed. Cher looked at Chad.
“And this affects us how?”
“I don’t know,” Chad said. “I just have a very bad feeling about it.”
“Citizens of New Albion,” Pepper boomed. “It is my great honor to inform you that this glorious colony is, as of this moment, on a war footing.”