A direct sequel to Aliens and Alien 3—Weyland-Yutani, the Colonial Marines, and Bishop’s creator all pursue the android for the deadly Xenomorph data contained in his brain. Written by T. R. Napper, author of the acclaimed 36 Streets, whose explosive work explores the artificial intelligence and what it is to be human.
And thanks to our friends at Titan Books, here is an excerpt from Aliens: Bishop, available in stores and via e-tailers on December 5th.
– Aliens: Bishop –
“Do me a favor. Disconnect me. I could be reworked, but I’ll never be top of the line again. I’d rather be nothing.”
Ellen Ripley sat nearby. Her shaved head gleamed in the harsh light of the lamp. A thin film of sweat coated her face, but she was still, watchful. She looked away, thinking. His vision was blurred from the damage, and it was hard to focus. But her decision didn’t take long.
“Sure.” She smiled at him, just briefly. First time since she reactivated him.
“Do it for me, Ripley.”
She looked at him for a few moments longer. He tried to read that final look, cherish it, but he couldn’t focus—
There was a flash of light, then a moment, a singular moment, held in the air, and finally he could see that single frame, that unmoving image, clearly. Ripley. She wasn’t much for sentiment, as far as humans went, but he was sure he could read a softness in her eyes. She was a friend, he hoped, and she was the last. All the others, gone.
And she, too, was going to die.
He was not used to lying, and so was bad at it, but lie to Ripley he did, so she would do it. So she would end his torment. A strange sensation came over him in those last moments, a quiet pain in his core. He had felt it when his squad had been wiped out, and later, after the crash, when even Newt and Hicks were gone. What was this ache? Was this—
Sadness? Light flashed, a light so very bright, and then the sync link in his mind pulsed like a firefly. His fingers jerked and suddenly he was online. Suddenly he was alive. Reactivated. He could feel it in an instant and feel the body—the new body?—in that same moment. Complete and vital and undamaged.
A face hovered above. Pale skin. High, arching forehead with a shock of brown hair atop. Deep-set lines bracketing nose and mouth. A mouth that smiled. Bishop’s mouth. Bishop’s face. A mirror. A slightly older version of himself. Bishop moved a hand to his face, then reached out to the one above. Scrutinizing blue eyes watched the synthetic as he touched this other’s face, this doppelgänger. The other
Bishop let him. The other Bishop spoke. “It’s good to see you smile, my son.”
Bishop hadn’t realized he was. “You are not a synthetic.” He withdrew his hand.
The other showed approval in its eyes. “No.”
“You are Michael Bishop. You built me.” “I am,” he said. “And I did. Twice.”
Twice. Bishop ran his fingertips over his own face again. There were no lines. He’d been given a younger one. He swung to a sitting position, and his body let him, without complaint. He was on a smooth steel table in a large laboratory, fifteen meters wide by twenty-five long. There was a bank of monitors on one of the shorter sides of the room, two black ergonomic chairs in front of it.
One of the corners was dominated by a stainless-steel vat three meters high. The pipes and fiber-optic cables emerging from the top told him it was the type a synthetic body was grown in. Gleaming racks on the wall were filled with all manner of equipment used for the same purpose: constructing and repairing an android body. There were two other steel slabs, like the one on which he was sitting. On one of those slabs, a ruination.
One arm, top part of the torso, a head, the face a mess, eye popping out grotesquely. Filmy sheen, the white innards exposed. His body. His remains. A sensation came over him, dizzying and confusing, as he saw the ruined thing lying there. Outside, looking in, at the broken ugly wretched creature he had become. Been made into by the Xenomorph. His hand came around to his belly. Why? Why should his hand drift there? This body was new, whole, uninjured.
He forced himself to look away from his dead body. His other self, lying not two meters away. Michael said nothing. Just stood straight and watched.
One of the walls had a long window and through it, in the next room, was a white metal tube approximately two meters long suspended from the ceiling. The side of the tube had a tiny rectangular window, and through the window, golden intricate circuitry, like some sort of symmetrical creeping vine. A quantum computer. The other room was otherwise quite bare. Sterile, dustless, gleaming. A single desk sat facing the computer, about three meters away, and on that desk a large slender screen.
The quantum computer was not of a make with which he was familiar. Not military. Not Weyland-Yutani. Strange. His mind hummed on that for a moment, wondering.
Bishop had been programmed with curiosity—scientific questioning, a yearning to explore and understand—but he pushed these thoughts down, let a subroutine consider them, and allowed his mind to focus.
The vat-grown muscles on his shoulders and legs were slightly larger than his previous form. He rolled his fingers, made fists, unrolled them. He was stronger. His mind hummed and there, too, he felt power, more than he’d had before. He felt a flash of fear and searched desperately for his memories.
There, all there.
Everything. Preserved, perfectly, everything he ever was, all his experiences, his fears, his hopes, all there, wrapped up in a new and vibrant mind.
Wait.
Some were missing. Important things. The dark things. He took a moment, trying to understand what had been lost.
Memories were not discrete in a human. They could not be compartmentalized. In a human mind, memories layer upon each other, touching, so one may spark another, and another again. Where one part of a life might not be disentangled from another, because they are all intertwined. Where childhood memory, for example, of ill-treatment by a parent, will in turn infect a relationship with a loved one as an adult. Where the lens of history colored everything, tainted everything.
Synthetics could compartmentalize memory. Of course they could. They did not form memories like a human, but rather like those of a camera, linear and ordered. So it was possible to section off certain memories, to cut them out and place them in a box. Sometimes simply delete them, but the lack of those memories was always clear. There was a blank space where those moments should be.
Michael Bishop had been watching him, all through this. Bishop wanted to ask him the most precious thing first, of the secret part of himself that had been lost, but that would be rude. His creator had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to bring Bishop back, and if the first words from his mouth were a complaint, then that would be, well, impolite.
“Why did you change my appearance?” he asked. Michael smiled. “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”
Bishop marked the Biblical reference. He was not sure if Jesus extended that golden rule to raising the dead, but given that Jesus did raise the dead, according to that particular myth so favored by humans, perhaps Christ would approve of Michael’s actions. Did Michael think of himself as a Jesus-like figure? Perhaps it was warranted, given he was the creator of the Bishop model, and other synthetics besides. Though that would only hold true if one were to consider synthetics approaching equality with humans.
Bishop pushed the line of thought down to another subroutine. Already his new mind was humming in the background, looking at all the questions raised by his resurrection, by his new surroundings. In the foreground of his mind, he considered Michael’s words in a split second.
“You wish to be younger, and stronger?” Bishop asked. “Who doesn’t?”
“And taller?”
Michael smiled. “I wish to be many things, Bishop. More than anything, I wish to be better, to be more than the man I am. To be part of something greater.” He took a step closer, scrutinizing. “As do you, I think.”
Bishop said nothing.
Michael waited, and when Bishop was quiet, he continued.
“Yet you’re not even whole within yourself, my son. You’re missing a vital piece of your own puzzle.”
“Yes,” Bishop said. “I did not want to seem ungrateful.”
Michael chuckled. “You needn’t worry about such formalities with me, Bishop. Go ahead: ask.”
“Would it be possible to first put on a pair of pants?”
Michael laughed again and indicated clothes, neatly folded, on a cart nearby. Bishop dressed, enjoying the sensation of the rub of cotton on his chest, the noise the belt made when he snapped it into place about this waist. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of his naked body; rather that his programming had told him it made others uncomfortable.
Bishop’s feet were bare, and through them he felt the hum of an engine. He found that comforting, and yet wasn’t sure why. It had always been so: the vibration of a ship’s engine, omnipresent, patient, subdued, an elegant yet powerful engineering creation propelling warm bodies through the cold hard vacuum of space.
Michael waited throughout, did not avert his eyes. Bishop wondered, for a moment, if he were delaying the question because he was scared of Michael’s answer. Scared. What a strange word to use. Synthetics could not feel fear.
“My memories,” he said, simply. “Some are missing.” “Yes,” Michael said. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “The most important memories. Your secrets, Bishop. All the wondrous and terrible things you saw on Acheron.” “Yes,” Bishop said. “Those.”
Michael turned his gaze to the other Bishop, the ruined one. “They are there, my son. Together, we will bring them all home to you.” He paused. “To us.
