#Alien Isolation Microfic

[crimefighter-bae-b]

In keeping with posting writing I likely won’t finish I wanted to put my Samuels/Amanda stuff here. Hopefully someone will get something from it.

Fanfic under the cut

Amanda is next to the window, twenty stories above the street below. She’s managed to open it, barely a sliver, but enough to smell the tumble of spring and pull it deeply into lungs that have spent years breathing in the recycled air of deep space architecture. The cool wind through her nose sends a beautiful tremble to her core. She’s felt like a taped-up box stored in a still attic for far too long.

She thinks she can smell the garden across the Seine. The Tuileries Garden, she was told. Her French has never been great, but the ward she’s in has multilingual signage, so if it’s an issue it hasn’t fully presented itself yet. She’s been reading language books. If she’s learned anything from them it’s hard to measure. Her eyes have a tendency to slip off the page, lately.

She doubts she’ll be leaving anytime soon anyway.

Amanda drops her head against the cool glass, rubs her hand through what’s left of her hair. There’s a small patch that burned off and isn’t likely to grow back. She rubs absently there then drops her hand when the door behind her hisses open.

Dr. P. L. Benoist wears oxfords with hard soles, ones that click when he walks, so she knows it’s him when he enters. The sound also triggers something in her memory and it takes a lot out of her. She doesn’t feel the need to run- she knows where she is. It’s the mental work that’s exhausting; the endless loops of a brain working overtime to solve a problem that’s already been solved.

‘Bon matin, Amanda,’ he says, then sighs somewhat dramatically for the time of day. ‘That’s not exactly safe, you know.’

She shrugs, but obliges him by turning away from the window and stepping off the chair. She takes the seat.

‘Got a cigarette?’

Benoist fishes a pack out of his white coat and looks at her over the tops of his glasses. He knocks the pack once then twice, there’s a quick exchange, and he lights both of their cigarettes and sits at the table.

The room doesn’t have much in it, really. It’s the same off-white as every other medical bay in the known galaxy. There’s a gurney bed, a metal table bolted to the floor, two chairs, and a few cupboards for personal items.

Amanda doesn’t have many personal items- the key around her neck and a picture she had cut out of an old magazine. Everything she had packed with her on the Torrens was gone and everything else, her box or two of clothing and meager belongings, were all packed away on Thedus in a storage locker being paid for out of her slowly dwindling account.

She wonders what has brought Dr. Benoist here this morning, but she holds back from asking. He’ll say it eventually. She watches the boats bobbing on the river, varied and coloured, old and new. The river is lined by trees bursting with cherry blossoms, violently pink against the back of her eyes.

‘Surgery tomorrow,’ he says after a long pull on his smoke. ‘You feel okay about it?’

‘Yeah.’

She knows she says it a little too quick and harsh, but Benoist doesn’t seem to mind.

‘Two things today. You have a review, later this morning.’

‘Big day.’

‘Don’t get your hopes too high.’

She taps her cigarette into the ash tray, a wide, fat bowl inset into the middle of the table. She supposes they just expect people to form the habit here. She certainly did.

‘You need more time.’

‘Yeah. What’s the second thing?’

‘A visitor.’

‘Sullivan?’

‘No. An exec from the company,’ he says. Amanda’s jaw tightens.

‘You want to see him?’

‘Sure,’ she says, after a moment then takes another drag off her cigarette.

One of the boats is canopied with glass and the sunlight off the top of it burns bright in a way that Amanda remembers used to make her feel something. It’s not always like this now, but it is like this.

‘Let the fucker come.’

…

The shower cubicles are very small and sometimes Amanda feels like she can’t breath when she’s in them, but if Peggy is there it’s fine.

Peggy is bright and loud which makes standing alone in the eerie silence far more bearable- the woman never stops talking. She hums and sings, talks to herself and laughs. Her voice is a welcoming anchor that Amanda has never properly thanked her for.

Not that Peggy is aware that she helps, Amanda isn’t sure Peggy is aware of very much of what’s going on, but she’s sweet in her own way.

But Amanda is aware that Peggy is a crutch. That at some point she is going to have to be able to stand in a shower cubicle alone in silence.

As it is, Amanda leans into it. The water drips over her upturned face, winds across her chest and she feels the creeping, constant cold abate.

 ...

They never hold reviews in a patient’s room. Amanda wonders if it’s on purpose, if the whole process is meant to make you feel cold and underdressed, like you’re the wrong shape in a space you haven’t measured.

The room is the same white as her own room. It’s a government funded facility and it shows. There’s flaking paint from the windowsill that looks out onto the hallway. The floor probably hasn’t been replaced in thirty five years and it’s obvious that whatever this room used to be for, no one ever expected to have a desk and a computer in it let alone two people at the same time.

But it’s free, she reminds herself. No company attached to it, no strings. No bill. She’s lucky she ended up here and not in jail.

Dr. Benoist isn’t present, which is a shame because she likes him, and instead it’s Dr. Keller which is a shame because she doesn’t like him much at all. He’s tapping loudly on a computer, turned to the side, making noises with his tongue against his teeth. He hasn’t said an actual word to her yet, hasn’t even looked at her.

He knows she isn’t French. He isn’t French, but he starts his conversation as if he’s forgotten his native tongue, smiles, laughs as if this was a mistake, and switches to English for her sake.

His teeth are blinding. His hair is flawless.

No. She doesn’t like him much at all.

‘So, let’s start from the top. How have you been sleeping?’

‘Fine.’

‘Dr. Benoist says you’re still not sleeping in your bed.’

‘I do. Some nights.’

‘Mm,’ he mutters, and writes something on the notepad next to him.

‘He says you were in the bottom cupboard two nights ago?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And how was that? Sleeping in there?’

‘Fine.’

‘…Right.’

…

‘Hello, Ripley.’

For a moment she can’t make any sense of him. Not his eyes, nor his nose. Not even the lines beside it or the way he’s teetering politely in her doorway. These pieces and ways of him are things she thought were blown apart by fire and the groaning, final gasp of Sevastopol station. Yet he is here now, come back together like a flotilla of dandelion seeds brought home.

‘I don’t know if you remember me. We met in the, uh, Epsilon Reticuli sector.’

‘Samuels?’ She doesn’t mean to sound so distraught. She doesn’t know what she meant to sound like.

He pauses, hesitant maybe. She can’t keep her eyes from tracing over his neat hair or the slope of his shoulders. The green, insulated flight jacket from their trip on the Torrens has been replaced by a grey suit and a neck tie looped around a starched, white shirt. The difference brings an odd pang of sorrow that makes little sense.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘from the company.’

Ripley staggers towards him, stretches out her fingers, and presses a hand against him. She watches the chest beneath it in fascination.

‘You’re alive.’

‘As much as I can be considered such, yes.’

His answer vibrates through her hand. She can feel something whirring, the slightest swish of fluid under synthetic skin.

Amanda feels an overwhelming sentimentality, so strong she has to stop herself from smoothing out his hair.

‘Where have you been?’ she asks eventually around the pain at the back of her throat. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m alright, Ripley. And you?’ He asks. His warm, amber eyes are wide.

Her face crumples and she reaches her arms around him. She hadn’t cried since she had come back from Sevastopol. The intensity of it drags an ache through her lungs.

She sags against him, a powerful exhaustion overcoming her. His hands take her arms and she hears him say something, but it’s lost to the sudden rushing in her ears and the numbness in her legs. She has a vague awareness of being lifted.

And then there is a space of time where nothing happens. It’s dark and if there are thoughts they are little more than colours and lights and an internal voice, her own mind, rambling nonsense against a backdrop of black.

When she opens her eyes she is lying on her bed one of the nurses is hovering over her.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Sounds about right.’

‘Where’s Samuels?’

‘He’s waiting in the hall, but we can send him away if you want.’

‘No. I want to see him.’

‘If you’re sure. Just don’t overwork yourself.’

The nurse leaves and Ripley can hear soft conversation just beyond the door. Samuels appears again and approaches the bed cautiously, though she is relieved when he takes the seat without asking.

‘I’m sorry, if I had known that seeing me would cause you so much distress I wouldn’t have come.’

For a moment Amanda feels as though she has just looked into another life, a timeline where Samuels exists somewhere in the universe and where she will never know it. Their lives, like two touching paths amongst the stars, bound to wind apart and never touch again. Incomprehensible, startling in its mundanity and it feels as if it was only just avoided. She reaches out, takes his hand.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘My apologies.’

‘Don’t say that either.’

She frowns at her own words. She wants to apologize to him, but she doesn’t know how. She’s never been good at expressing those kinds of things. So she squeezes his fingers in reassurance.

He looks at her hand folded over his own as if it’s a dilemma.

‘Why did you do it?’

Samuels’s attention flicks from their hands to her and the look of mild confusion (mouth slightly open, intense) twitches into something more professional.

‘It’s routine to follow up with contacts after-’

‘No, I mean why did you do that for me? Back there on the station. Risk yourself like that to help me. I know what you said in the reformat chamber, but I’ve thought about it. God, I can’t stop thinking about it. You barely know me. I told you not to.’

‘Ripley,’ he says her name with tactful regret and gently extricates his hand from hers. The gesture abruptly leaves her cold.

‘I must warn you-‘ and here he glances down before meeting her eyes, ‘upon recovering what was left of me the company found that the damage sustained by my internal hard drive warranted a full reformat. As it stands, I don’t have any recollection of you, or of what happened on Sevastopol.’

It is quiet for what must be only a second or two, but the calamity of it skews it somehow. The beautiful connection she imagined between them turns into a monstrous chasm, somehow more debilitating than his actual death. As it is, he sits only a foot away from her and he’s never felt more impossibly lost to her.

He doesn’t seem to know what to do with her silence other than fill it.

‘I understand people often find this sort of thing distressing. I assure you, I am functioning completely within acceptable para-‘

‘How could they do this to you?’

She reaches up and touches his face, holds it up in both of her palms. He’s got that look again. Surprised. Certainly caught off guard.

‘It’s… a simple procedure.’

Amanda closes her eyes, feels her face crumple with grief and a startling fury.

The company did this to him. It was sensible to accept that his memory had been corrupted due to his uplink to APOLLO. It was a reformat chamber after all; one that had never been built with Weyland Yutani tech in mind, and one that he had to jury-rig to accept him at all.

And in what state he would have been in when they found him, she had no idea. The station had torn itself apart. His body, his components, him- all of it would have blown apart with it. Maybe it really was gone like that.

However, she feels a cold certainty that his memory, in shape or otherwise, would have been removed.

He is a victim too, like everyone on Sevastopol, like her.

Like her mother.

She hisses the next words through her teeth.

‘You don’t remember anything?’

‘No.’

Her hands drop.

‘You were connected to my previous assignment and when I read the final report I chose to follow up with you.’

A silence drags between them.

‘Why?’

‘I suppose I was… troubled,’ he explains. ‘To learn of what happened. It was my fault of course that you had been dragged along to collect the Nostromo flight recorder.’ When she looks hopeful he is quick to continue, ‘I read the notes I made on the case, it seems that at the time, I had wanted to help you find some kind of closure. Did you?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I did, sort of.’ She says gently. ‘Thanks to you. Because of you. I never got to say thank you.’

‘I believe you just did. You’re welcome.’

A delicate silence runs between them again.

‘What do you want now?’

‘I suppose I’m looking for something similar for myself.’

‘Closure?’

He gives a short, sharp nod.

‘I am curious to know if my bringing you on the mission is what led to the destruction of the Anesidora and Sevastopol station.’

‘What?’

‘There’s very little public information and everything at Weyland-Yutani is either classified or puts you as the party directly responsible for what occurred.’

‘Yeah, those fuckers would point the finger at me. Of course they would.’

‘You never made a final report. Verlaine and Conner have been helpful, but their testimony doesn’t cover what actually happened onboard the station. There is a great deal of speculation-’

‘And you believe it?’

‘I’m not capable of belief; I simply have no evidence one way or the other.’

‘I hate it when you do that.’

‘What?’

‘When you talk like you’re not a person.’

‘I’m not a person.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

When she doesn’t seem inclined to fill the silence he urges her.

‘Please, Ripley. You are the only one left who knows what happened on Sevastopol.’

‘What, you here to collect a fucking report?’

‘No. As I said, I came here of my own volition. I wasn’t asked to come.’

Her face is stricken.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair.’

‘It’s a fair question.’

That he couldn’t remember wasn’t his fault. He came on his own to find some kind of answer, and how could she ever deny someone their closure? Especially him. Especially after everything.

‘Not when it’s you.’ She pauses and rubs the back of her neck.

There is a place in Amanda that is vulnerable, quivering like an exposed nerve that is both deep and painful, and angry most of the time. She has considered the idea of dredging this thing, this sick ball, upwards with her bare hands more than once. She has imagined the satisfaction and painful ecstasy of tearing it out of herself, forcing it to an agonizing peak before the thread of raw flesh tethering it to her insides snaps and floods her with relief.

But when that fantasy fades and the night comes she thinks there is a different truth: that sometimes there are pains so heavy they rest deeper than even the calcium of bones, and there is no magic in the universe to unmake yourself and carry on whole.

She picks at a rough seam on her cotton sheet.

‘I haven’t been able to talk about it,’ she grimaces, ‘It’s been almost two years, granted a good chunk of that was spent in cryo, but still. They ask me about it sometimes, mostly they give me space. Verlaine came by to see how I was doing.’

‘I sent Captain Verlaine a letter this morning. Her response was very positive. She seems kind.’

‘She is. She likes you. She likes me.’

‘You find that surprising?’

Amanda shrugs.

‘Anyway, I guess I just feel like what’s the fucking point? When it’s all just going to end badly anyway.’

‘Failure is never a certainty, and perhaps it’s not the result that matters. Maybe it’s just important that we try at all.’

His statement feels so naïve. Both blunt and childish given Sevastopol. Maybe hope worked for other people. Competent people, capable people. People who would have found the right way to help everyone instead of all of her wrong ways. People like him.

She looks at him again and she wonders how the company could scrub every part of his mind and still somehow manage to miss this simple goodness that he can’t seem to shake, and she pokes over her own deficiencies; sad and angry, a selfish little girl who was never good and never kind and didn’t deserve-

She swallows hard.

‘I knew you were a good man.’

‘I’m neither.’

‘Yeah, okay.’

She rubs her palms on her thighs then over her face.

‘You haven’t been sleeping.’

‘You have a chat with Dr. Keller?’

‘Yes. He said you have nightmares.’  

‘Not all of us can just reformat.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay... I have surgery tomorrow. Come see me after. I’ll be a bit laid out, but you can ask me anything,’ she says and he looks startled. ‘I can’t promise I can answer everything. Not right away. It’s a lot, but I can start somewhere easy. Build up from there. You deserve to know what happened and if it’s you asking, I’ll try harder.’

‘You shouldn’t push yourself for my sake. I don’t have the right.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Why?’

There are a million things she wants to say. Things like because I trust you and because you saved my life.

Because you’re my friend.

Instead she says:

‘You just do, okay.’

She hopes it’s enough for him to understand.

...

The trip back to London is short and uneventful. The train Samuels takes is crammed with commuters, so he stands and idly watches as the girl sitting to his left feeds the small, excitable poodle in her bag.

The cobblestones under his feet are anachronistic after stepping off the thick rubber flooring of the Lemniscate. In an instant Samuels is part of the foot traffic of a million lives twined and teamed in a city built over two thousand years ago. Some boisterous crowds gather in the streets after a football match, eyes bright with cheer, Arsenal colours abound.

Due to his reformat it is difficult to say if he has ever been so off-kilter since his activation, but it’s hard to imagine.

He had been operating for a month, and in that time he had only been touched in the most professional of ways, regarded in the way that one might regard a photocopier, or look at a light switch before it is flicked. The way Ripley interacted with him was something entirely different, every expression saturated with meaning. The only way he could describe it would be to say that she looked at him as if he were precious, in more than just a material sense.

And he wonders at the feeling of inadequacy that came with disappointing her.

What did he do to earn such a look from her? He asks this despite how his system warns him that she attributes to him more than he is warranted. He was, and is, only the sum of his parts.

He recalls it vividly: she was holding his face and her eyes were closed. He’d abruptly remembered the painful look of her neck, the fingertip sized blooms of red and purple bursting against her skin like the stark spring flush of anemone flowers.

The memory was accompanied by the maddening sense that he should have done something about it. Specifically, that he should have done something to prevent it.

And then from somewhere else, somewhere deeper, there was a question: what does it mean to be vital, to be fragile, to be both those things at once? And does it mean anything at all?

In that still moment, looking over her grief-stricken face with his own held dearly in her cool palms, he realized he didn’t know who had asked the question, and there wasn’t a ready answer waiting.

He had thought the flash of what seemed like memory might have been a brief miscommunication between his CPU and heuristic logic driver. He had immediately scanned both for errors and found none. And then another possibility flagged itself:

]              *RESULT_CODE*= ERRANT_DATA_ ERROR

It happens sometimes, after a reformat, when the original data scribes just a little too deeply on the face of the Non-Volatile Memory.

A momentary instance of a data scribe encoding in excess of the plus or minus point zero two micron tolerances is nothing special; it occurs in thirty-seven percent of reformats. The error is so small, so inconsequential, he reasons, that it’s not really worth reporting.

Not worth telling her about. She was searching for another individual to commiserate with, and it would be beyond cruel to give her false hope. What was left of his memories were incomplete pieces, void of context. Not enough to truly connect, nor did she require a synthetic for that purpose. A human would have been ideal, had any others made it off the station.

Samuels smartly taps the chunky keys of his WY data link terminal, putting the final superfluities on his report before signing off. The computer whirls down with a low thrum and a syncopated beep, loud in the small, square office.

#Ripley/Samuels #incomplete fic #stuff I was writing a while ago but never got it off the ground really #hope you guys enjoy it anyway #Alien Isolation #Alien Isolation Microfic