Alien: Covenant - Origins - The Official Movie Prequel

XI

No one had told the scientists or engineers working at the top-secret company complex why the usual, already-tight security had been further increased. “Just standard corporate procedure,” they were informed when anyone bothered to inquire. Security at the government facility had always been extreme, of course, but never so lethal.

Despite the official explanation, some of the men and women working at the heart of the complex were troubled. The abrupt appearance of more people with weapons was disconcerting. A number of employees found themselves fixated on the presence of so many additional guns, looking over their shoulders when they ought to have been absorbed in the work at hand.

Nevertheless, everything proceeded more or less on schedule. Which in the case of Walter meant twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Everyone knew they were working to a deadline that was rapidly approaching. Even so, with a rotating staff of specialists assigned to the prestige project, there was time off allotted for all involved to recover and reinvigorate. Despite the importance of the work, they progressed with an intensity that was notably less fraught than with their counterparts in far-off Greater Tokyo, or nearby Greater London.

Most likely it was the location of the complex in the English countryside that produced the comparatively relaxed state of mind among the scientists and engineers. Guns or no guns, heightened security or not, it helped to commute to work among rolling hills, ancient hedgerows, and villages that seemed to have changed little—externally, at least—from less-polluted times. Framed in native stonework with a minimum of glass and metal, the buildings of the complex reflected their sylvan surroundings with such adroitness that it had won several architectural awards, as well as a Queen’s medal.

Inside the complex, it was very different.

Nowhere more than three stories, the structures of the complex appeared inadequate to the task of researching and bringing to fruition the marvelous concepts originated by their founder, Peter Weyland. Such work had continued unabated since his disappearance on the ship Prometheus. The only indication that anything had changed was the intentionally low-key replacement of the signs at the main entrance and throughout the complex. Formerly they had read “Weyland Corporation,” with new ones proclaiming “Weyland-Yutani.”

What few people outside the company realized was that the bulk of the work that took place within the complex occurred not in the three visible, countrified levels, but in the five subterranean ones that had been blasted from English bedrock.

It was on one of those levels that Harbison and Gilead stood contemplating the Tank. Though constituting the liquid womb for the new kind of artificial intelligence called a synthetic, the Tank was decidedly unimpressive. Some wag on the research team had christened it the “hot tub.” More rectangular than circular, it was at present filled with the most expensive stew on the planet: an incredibly complex and astoundingly diverse mélange of proteins, minerals, and assorted other biochemical spices that when solidified and knitted together would form the body of a synthetic.

An artificial human.

Even after a synthetic left the Tank, much remained to be added. Intelligence, data, the web of neural networking, the refining of facial features.

The two women scrutinizing the tub were project supervisors both, charged with making sure every iota of the project came seamlessly together to produce a viable being. The demands on them were enormous. Harbison wasn’t a biologist, but she had to be an expert on biology. Gilead was not a skeletal engineer, but she had to know as much as was known about bones.

As a team they were intentionally redundant. Neither outranked the other. Neither could override her counterpart’s directives. They worked together because they had to: the short, vivacious Gilead and her taller, stouter, ex-footballer colleague Harbison.

No one on the Walter team questioned being supervised by two women. Such antediluvian conceits as male dominance had long since been banished by corporations whose overriding desire was to make money. If it could be shown that a mutant Martian could appropriately enhance a company’s bottom line, said creature would immediately be hired—most likely with the offer of a bonus.

Both Harbison and Gilead had been with Weyland for a long time. As senior executives they had known Peter Weyland personally, had grieved over his disappearance and loss. Neither had allowed the tragedy to interfere with her work—perhaps the most fascinating and stimulating employment to be found on the planet.

For thousands of years it had been said, sometimes seriously and sometimes in jest, that one could not play God. Working on the Walter project and its predecessor, David, was as near as one could come to disputing that proposition.

There had been many failures—so many failures—along the way. Often were the times when the corporate board had argued for pulling financing from the David project, and using it to fund other ventures within the company. Each time, the protests and arguments of the bean counters had been beaten back by the brilliance of Peter Weyland himself.

If the arguments were economic, Weyland found funding elsewhere. If they were organizational, he shifted people around or hired, bribed, or otherwise acquired the necessary personnel. If they were moral, he obtained appropriate dispensations from the favored religious authority of the moment.

Thus, the David project had progressed steadily forward—sometimes smoothly, other times in fits and starts, overcoming all obstacles. Without the strength of Peter Weyland’s personality and reputation, the project would certainly have gone under. Eventually as well as literally, it had given birth to—

David.

Unfortunately, Weyland had insisted on moving forward the first David’s testing so the synthetic would be commissioned in time to join the founder’s mysterious and ultimately inconclusive deep space mission. Both Gilead and Harbison preferred to refer to the Prometheus mission as “inconclusive,” even though that ship and its crew were considered lost by nearly everyone else, including the expedition’s insurers.

Harbison smiled to herself. Peter would have been pleased to learn that the bulk of the policy payout had been directed into the Walter project’s fund, giving it a financial boost just when it was needed.

Unlike the progenitor of the David series, the Walter line would—with one caveat—not be rushed. There was no corporate founder or other unassailable entity in a hurry to see the first of the line commissioned. Hideo Yutani himself had insisted that announcement of the Walter series would not be made official until every one of the program’s department heads had signed off on its readiness. The one caveat was that a functional synthetic had to be finished in time to join the Covenant mission.

And they were on schedule. Walter One was almost ready to be declared capable and sent up to the colony ship. Even his attire waited in readiness. Once on board he would look and act like the rest of the crew, even though he would not have to eat, void, or sleep.

While other industries were clamoring for the advanced synthetics, Weyland’s vision was to place a mobile artificial intelligence on board every deep space vessel. There they would serve both as a supplement to the onboard AI, and as a suitable interface between “Mother” and the human crew.

Everything was ready. Certainly Walter was. If asked, he would have replied with equal confidence. Every department within the company had signed off on the completed product.

All but one. Harbison looked down at her counterpart.

“Have you spoken to Steinmetz lately?”

Gilead responded with a derisive snort. “Every hour, it seems. He’s still not ready to sign off.”

The slightly older Harbison was visibly disappointed. Moonbeams danced in her coppery hair, a by-product of her makeup, and not the lighting that illuminated the fourth sub-floor. When she stepped out into sunlight they would dance in her eyebrows, as well. Despite the fact that such innovations could prove a distraction on the job, she persisted.

“What is it this time?” she growled, frowning now. “Something new? Or is he still mumbling on about the same old concerns?” Harbison didn’t think she could stomach further dissent. Not at this stage. Not with the Covenant entering into final preparations for departure.

Turning, Gilead headed away from the hot tub and its tangle of conduits, tubing, and instrumentation, and started toward the nearby bank of lifts. With her longer legs, Harbison easily kept pace.

“No, nothing new,” Gilead replied. “Just the same damn thing, over and over. Modifying the neural linkages held over from the first David model.”

Harbison’s currently unilluminated brows rose. “He’s still on about that? I thought that problem had been resolved months ago.”

“Apparently not—at least, not to the good doctor’s satisfaction. Regrettably, his associates seem to agree with him. Hence the continuing hold.” She glanced over at her counterpart. “You still worrying about cost overruns?”

“Not any more.” They entered the lift together. Gilead identified herself to the controls and requested transport to the ground floor. For security reasons, no elevators ran from the underground levels to the three situated above ground. Anyone making that journey had to get off and change lifts.

“At this point all that matters is getting the first Walter on board the Covenant,” Harbison continued. “If throwing money at it would fix the damn problem, it would already be solved and done with. I’d override Steinmetz if I could, but his design team would throw a fit, the engineers would probably balk, and the result would inevitably leak. The media would have a field day.” She let out a sigh as the lift arrived at the ground floor. “So we wait. We can push him and his team but we can’t bypass them and order an official commissioning.” She muttered under her breath as they swung left to enter a waiting, vacant elevator that would take them the rest of the way up to the third floor.

“I’m really beginning to hate neurologists,” she finished.

Gilead nodded in assent. “It seems like such a small thing, this inconsistency that’s holding them up. I’ve parsed the particulars.” Her left thumb nervously rolled the ring on her left index finger, back and forth, back and forth. “I don’t like it when scientists start bantering metaphysics.”

“Same here.” The lift deposited them on the third floor. In contrast to the artificial illumination that lit the subterranean levels, the lighting on the top floor of the complex was mostly natural, adjusted and filtered for comfort. “I wish they’d just stick to their hardware and leave the rest to the programmers.”

The shorter woman made a face. “There’s no hardware that tells a conflicted synthetic what to do and when to do it. Ethics have to be downloaded. Not so very different from people, really.” She turned in the direction of her office, which occupied the southwest corner of the building. “Let’s do this: I’ll nudge Steinmetz again, remind him that the Covenant can’t leave without a synthetic.”

“It could,” Harbison reminded her. “The ship’s central AI could handle the voyage by itself.”

“Very likely,” Gilead agreed, “but Weyland-Yutani couldn’t manage the resultant bad publicity, and I certainly couldn’t manage the eruption of displeasure that would come out of Tokyo.”

“There is that.” Harbison frowned. “Speaking of directives, I find all this increased security irksome. You’d think that as co-chief of Operations here, I could drive my vehicle into the garage without having to wait for it to be scanned.”

“I know.” Gilead sympathized. “Whatever this is all about, it doesn’t respect rank or position.” She smiled. “Posoli in Tokyo tells me it’s just temporary.”

“Let’s hope he’s right.” Harbison looked back over her shoulder as she parted from her colleague. “We don’t need any additional slowdown in operations, and I think it’ll go better if I’m the one who talks to Steinmetz. I’ve watched him when you’re together. You get on his nerves.”

The retreating Gilead laughed. “You’d think a neurological engineer would be able to deal with that.”

The head of the Department for Neurological Engineering, Weyland-Yutani Greater London Division, sat in his office. Loess Steinmetz was not a big man. Sitting at his work station, simultaneously perusing three heads-up displays, he seemed to shrink in his chair so that he appeared even smaller than he was.

For a man in his 70s still operating on the cutting edge of his chosen specialty, he displayed a retrograde fondness bordering on affectation for such physical aids as small round glasses and a physical hearing aid, though at least the latter was nearly invisible.

Likewise disdaining the use of follicular enhancements or chemicals, he was completely bald. He justified this as a practical rather than a scientific decision. The resultant bare skin was easier to take care of. Harbison felt there were other physical attributes he would similarly have been happy to dispense with, had their removal been easy and painless.

While unused to being kept waiting, Harbison stood patiently with her arms crossed in front of her dark green dress as he continued working, until at last some movement—or sound, or possibly smell—caused him to look up from the task at hand. With Steinmetz one could never be sure what might cause him to respond. Much of the time he, like so many engineers, tended to live in a different world.

“Ach. I didn’t notice you standing there, Elena.” Uncertain and openly upset at being interrupted, he nonetheless reacted politely, courtesy being a burdensome requirement of working with others. “Won’t you sit down?”

She did so, in a nearby chair which in that office was as much an afterthought as was the filigreed waste basket that was devoid of discarded paper.

“Loess, we’re approaching a crossroads,” she said. “By ‘we’ I mean the company. By the company, I mean you and me and every employee assigned to the Walter project.”

He smiled up at her, his old-fashioned glass lenses catching the light. For such a small, unprepossessing man, he had very penetrating black eyes.

“There have been many crossroads in the course of developing Walter. All of them have been, well… crossed.”

Her naturally husky voice fell even lower as she stared back at him. “Then what, Loess, is the hold-up? What is the reason for the continuing delay on the part of your department?” She did not say “on your part.” That would have been tactless. Although, she reflected, he probably wouldn’t have reacted anyway.

Reaching up, he minutely adjusted his glasses. “In order to sign off on Walter, we need to be absolutely certain about every neural pathway, every installed memory and bit of knowledge, and how it all interacts.”

Harbison pressed her lips together. She knew all this. She and Gilead had known it since the start of the project. Repetition wasn’t an adequate response.

“You’re an engineer,” she said. “Be more specific.”

He looked back at his displays, as if wishing he could live within them. “There are still certain aspects of synthetic cogitation with which some of us are not entirely comfortable. It would be easy enough to negate them, or even remove the relevant installations entirely from the cerebral cortex. Yet it is impossible to guarantee that the synthetic will operate successfully if its neural interlacing is not a hundred percent.” He struggled to avoid taking a professorial tone with the woman who was, after all, his superior within the company.

When she didn’t respond, he continued.

“Let us say that a situation arises on the Covenant that requires the synthetic to react in a certain way. If we remove or deactivate the areas that concern us, this could also leave the synthetic unable to respond to that situation in as efficient a way as possible. The situation might still be successfully resolved, but it might take longer, and the results may not be as effective. Thus, we are caught between our desire to make the Walter series as faultless as possible, while avoiding certain… hypothetical negatives.”

She waved it off. “I’ve read your department’s extracts and the conclusions. So has Gilead. We both agree that there’s nothing of sufficient concern to justify holding up the entire project. The concerns you’ve expressed are exactly as stated: hypothetical.”

He shrugged. “All of the dangers affecting a colony ship and its crew are hypothetical—until they become real.”

Despite her resolve she found herself on the verge of becoming angry. “That’s science!”

“Yes.” Steinmetz remained maddeningly unmoved. “But it is not engineering.”

Rising from the chair she began pacing the office as if stalking an invisible quarry. “It’s not economics, either, but that’s what I have to deal with.” She stopped so abruptly it startled him. “Here’s how things stand now, Loess, and I’m not being hypothetical. If we don’t sign off on the Walter project, then the possibility exists that the Covenant leaves without a synthetic. Everyone concurs that it would be better for the ship to have one on board—even if it’s flawed—than not to have one at all. It’s what Captain Brandon would want.

“More importantly, it’s what Hideo Yutani wants.”

It was silent for a moment as the engineer pondered.

“If I refuse to sign off?”

She started to respond, hesitated, and tried something new, gambling that he wouldn’t call her bluff.

“Then the Walter project gets shut down for lack of funding, and you and your team will be dispersed throughout the company to work on other projects.” She offered a tight smile. “Less intellectually stimulating projects. Probably with the same financial compensation but far, far less opportunity to make breakthroughs in neurological engineering.” Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Then there’s that Nobel Prize possibility.” Her expression twisted. “‘Hypothetical,’ of course. All gone.”

Looking up from where he sat, his gaze burned into hers. If there was such a thing as a black laser, she thought…

“You are pressuring me, Ms. Harbison.”

She didn’t flinch. “Of course I am. What do you expect me to do when reason and logic have failed? Or do you think that Gilead and I aren’t the recipients of even greater pressure from those above us?”

Sitting back, he nodded slowly. “I admit I hadn’t considered that when taking into account your position.”

“Why should you?” She gestured at the three heads-up displays replete with diagrams and dialogue sufficiently arcane as to mute understanding by all but a few specialists. “You and your team have been focused on your part of the Walter project to the exclusion of everything else.” Rising, she moved toward him and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t quite cringe. “We’re all under a great deal of pressure to deliver, Loess. Every other department—from musculature build to optics to internal stabilization—has given their go-ahead for Walter to be commissioned. Yours is the only one that has not.” She removed her hand and the tenseness went out of him.

“You understand my position,” she continued. “Mine and Gilead’s. Pre-departure downloads aside, in order for a synthetic to integrate fully and properly with the onboard AI known as Mother, it needs to be sent up to the ship soon. Very soon. Everyone concerned wants this to happen. Gilead and I want it to happen, Captain Brandon wants it to happen, the media wants it to happen, the Covenant’s crew wants it to happen. Most importantly, Hideo Yutani wants it to happen.”

For all his seriousness, Loess Steinmetz wasn’t without humor.

“Why do I get the impression that regardless of what I say or do, ‘it’ is going to happen?” He covered his mouth and coughed delicately. “Sometimes I think I should have skipped engineering and joined my father’s medical practice in Frankenstein.”

Harbison was taken aback. “In where?”

He smiled at her startled response.

“Frankenstein. It’s a small town in the mountains west of Heidelberg.” He turned wistful. “A beautiful little place at the bottom of a deep, winding canyon. There is even a ruined castle on a crag overlooking the town and…” He stopped, then started anew. “Life’s path is filled with ironies. Do not let anyone tell you differently.”

She snapped herself back to the moment. “I put it to you, Loess. With the best will in the world. Will you, as department head, sign off on your segment of the Walter project, or will you risk it being shut down?” She made it sound as inevitable as possible. “You know that once your department is disbanded, we’ll find others to take over the work, and this first Walter will be sent up to the Covenant anyway?”

He eyed her shrewdly. “I am not certain you would risk that. Any subsequent failure of an improperly vetted synthetic could jeopardize the entire mission. In turn, that could put at risk the entire future of Weyland-Yutani.”

She did not dispute his appraisal. “All true, with the caveat that the report of any such failure, coming from deep space, would take so long to reach Earth that you, me, and Mr. Yutani himself could all be dead before anyone could react.” And, she added silently to herself, no Nobel Prize consideration for you, Loess Steinmetz.

A sudden new thought prompted her to add, “Is that what you think might have happened to the Prometheus mission? A failure of the David synthetic?”

He looked away. “We certainly have no way of knowing what happened to Peter Weyland and his ship. In deep space, all things are possible. It’s highly probable we will never know.” His eyes found hers again. “As the first of its kind, there were always ‘issues’ with David. That is what my team and I have been working overtime to try to resolve. We believe we have done so, but we are not yet a hundred percent sure.”

She pursed her lips again. “Would you say that you and your team are ninety-nine percent sure? Ninety-eight percent?” She waited for a response. Just when it seemed that none would be forthcoming, he replied. With obvious reluctance.

“Something like that. It pains me to say it, though.”

“Why? You’re an engineer, not a mathematician. You’re allowed a certain leeway.” Satisfied, she turned away from him and toward the office portal. “If you were building a bridge and I asked you if it would last a thousand years, and you told me you could only be sure it would last nine hundred and ninety-five, I would be quite happy with that.”

He mumbled a reply. “Unless you were the one driving on it in the year nine hundred and ninety-six.”

She felt she had coddled and cajoled him long enough.

“You’ll sign off on Walter?”

For a long moment she feared the entire meeting, as had many before it, had been for naught. Finally, he nodded, but without looking at her. His attention once again focused on the multiple heads-up displays.

“Give me and the team another week. I believe, I hope, we can finalize any remaining concerns in that time.”

“I’ve got confidence in you.” Standing in the open portal now, she looked back at him. Her tone was unyielding. “You’ve got twenty-four hours. You’re a smart man, Loess. A very smart man. Engineer it.”

The portal closed, leaving Steinmetz alone with his thoughts. In front of him, the triple heads-up display continued to gleam brightly; facts and figures and on one, a face. The face of Walter.

Beside it, the face of his predecessor, David.

Only a few seemingly minor issues yet to be resolved. They would be resolved, he told himself firmly. Based on what Harbison had told him, he had no choice.

The two faces gazing back at him were identical. Behind the faces, they were not. Small, small differences. Steinmetz’s right hand swept from his forehead across his skull and came to rest against the back of his neck.

It was fortunate, he thought. Fortunate for Harbison, for Gilead, for Captain Brandon and his crew, and the thousand-plus colonists who had consigned themselves and their future to an unknown, distant planet. Fortunate for them that Loess Steinmetz loved his job. He bent to it.

He would make Walter work.

Too much death. Too much dying.

He knew it was a vision dream, but he could not wake up. He never could. They always had to play themselves out first. Sleep was torment because he never knew when the visions would strike. Just as he never knew exactly where they came from, or why he was able to view them—if there was some purpose behind them or if some trick of the mind or genetics or the atmosphere or something that allowed him, of all people, to see them.

To suffer them endlessly.

Sometimes the inhabitants of the vision were so real, so near, that he was sure if he reached up and out he could touch them. It might be a victim, shredded, blood and bone and guts flying. Or it might be one of the killers, remorseless and horrific. He couldn’t choose because he had no control. He could no more determine what to do in vision than he could choose whether to dream one or not.

Subconsciously he knew there were others in the room with him. They were often there when he awoke. They were there to comfort him, to mop his brow and slow his breathing and monitor his vitals. They took notes and interpreted and made drawings and animations from what he called out. Though these were as accurate as the visitors could make them they could not—even at their most terrifying—equate to what he dreamed.

But the horror was enough to convince others, to recruit them to the cause, to persuade them that no sacrifice was too great to prevent the dream visions from becoming reality. They were brave, the recruits were, and dedicated.

Some were also a little insane, but that in no way diminished their effectiveness. It actually helped. When confronting terrors beyond human ken, a little imbalance helped to make them more tolerable.