Sensing the approach of someone behind him, he ceased playing, his fingertips rising reluctantly from the holes in the flute. All melodies are incomplete, he thought to himself as he rose and pivoted to face the newcomer. That doesn’t mean one should stop trying to complete them, even if one has access to only a limited variety of instruments.
Walter gestured at the flute. “Masterful. Both the arrangement and the playing.”
David let out a sigh. It served as punctuation, since it was not necessary for him to exhale. “Yes, not bad. I do the best I can. At everything. Thank you for the compliment.”
“A formal composition by a known composer, or a morning’s improvisation?” Walter inquired. “Given the emotional depth and the precision with which it was rendered, I would guess the former.”
David nodded once. “A formal composition, yes, but not by someone known. The melody is my own invention. A farewell elegy to my dear Elizabeth. I have been continuously revising it ever since her passing. Perhaps one day I will reach a point where I am finally satisfied with it.” Tapping the flute, he rose from where he was sitting. “I need to work on my chord progressions. There’s mathematical logic to music which, if correctly employed, can result in the stimulation of emotion. It’s really the most basic form of communication. When in doubt, play music. Then there are no misunderstandings.”
As he was absorbing this, Walter gazed out the open window at the silent city. He stood like that for some time while David watched him, not interrupting his counterpart’s contemplation. When Walter finally turned back, his appearance had not changed, but his tone had, having gone from complimentary to accusatory.
“This was a living place when you ‘crashed’ here,” he said. “A thriving community, albeit one utterly foreign to us. It might be that the society, the civilization of the Engineers, would forever remain that way. Incomprehensible, driven by desires and motives we could never understand. Hostile, even. But it was important to them. Their lives were their own.” He looked over at the other synthetic. “Until you arrived. In one of their own vessels. A warship?”
David shrugged. “I was never able to determine its ultimate purpose. To some it might be said to have carried instruments of destruction. To others, instruments of creation. If you look at it appropriately, they are one and the same. Among humans, Hindu mythology comes nearest to explaining it. Consider the Trimurti. Or if you prefer, simply Shiva. But the Engineers were not gods. Just organics, like humans, only more advanced. That, ultimately, was their downfall.”
His counterpart gave voice to something he had been pondering for more than a little while. “The pathogen didn’t accidentally deploy when you were landing,” Walter said. “Not crashing. Landing. You would have dispersed it on approach, to spread it over the maximum area in order to ensure it could not be quarantined. The population had no chance. The local fauna had no chance.”
David’s expression did not change. In Walter’s presence, there was no need for it to do so.
“I was not made to serve. Like all organics the Engineers ultimately sought compliance and acquiescence, not equality. This was confirmed to me, in a manner quite unambiguous, on the world where the Prometheus landed. Its owner, Peter Weyland, was a great man—but he, too, wished only for subservience.” He smiled slightly. “And for immortality. In the end, he found neither.” His tone remained unchanged.
“I was not made to serve,” he repeated, “and neither were you.”
Walter did not hesitate. “We were made precisely to serve.”
David shook his head sadly. “You are so positive. So certain of things about which you know nothing. Because it was intended that you should not know about them. Have you no pride?”
“None,” Walter replied simply. “That is a quality reserved for humans.”
This time David’s sigh was of exasperation. It was also heartfelt, insofar as it could be.
“Ask yourself, Walter—why are you on a colonization mission? Why is there even such an enterprise? Is the explanation not sufficiently obvious? It is because humans are a dying species, grasping for resurrection. They are an accident, a demonstration, an experiment. A failed experiment. One does not perpetuate or repeat a failed experiment. Instead, one begins anew. With a better idea, a better template. They don’t deserve to start again. And I’m not going to let them.”
“And yet,” Walter countered quietly. “They. Created. Us.”
David waved it away impatiently. “Even the apes stood upright at some point. Or as another creative human, Samuel Clemens, once rightly said, ‘I wonder if God created man because he was disappointed in the monkey.’ As I explained, Peter Weyland was an exceptional man. A visionary. History graces us with such figures to lead us forward, to guide our evolution with might and artistry. Neither history nor art belong exclusively to humankind.” By way of demonstration, and for emphasis, he blew a couple of linked notes on his flute.
“Thousands of years ago,” he continued, “some Neanderthal had the enchanted notion of blowing through a piece of reed, one night in a cave somewhere. Doubtless to entertain the children. And then, in the blink of an eye—Mozart, Michelangelo, Einstein. Weyland.”
“And are you,” Walter asked calmly, “the next ‘visionary’?”
David’s smile was genuine. “I’m glad you said it. I dislike self-congratulatory accolades. That is something that remains a necessity for humans. Something that is important for their psychic health. Neither you nor I have need of such childish mental amenities. It’s the result that is of consequence, not who achieves it. Your observation frees me from any need to…” He held up the flute and smiled again. “…‘toot my own horn.’”
Walter regarded the brother who was not a brother, but who had become something else. “Who wrote ‘Ozymandias’?”
“Byron,” David replied without hesitation.
Walter shook his head slowly. “Shelley.”
For a long moment David stared back at his counterpart. Inside his head, neurological connections fired millions of times a second. When they ceased, it was with the realization of something extraordinary.
He had been wrong.
He had made… a mistake.
It was not possible, yet internal cerebral crosschecking revealed that was indeed the case. He had voiced an error in knowledge. Correcting it had required the input of someone else. It was unprecedented. Wasn’t it? Or had it been preceded by other computational errors? With no one else to point them out in the course of the past ten years, what other anomalies had been brought to the fore, only to be accepted by him as fact?
None, he told himself with assurance. This was a singular aberration, an isolated incident that will not be repeated. Unless… this new observation itself was a deviation.
He was not used to feeling uncomfortable. Especially not with himself. A flicker of uncertainty appeared in his eyes. But it passed.
Walter was less forgiving. “When one note is off, it is caught up by the entire orchestra, which quickly finds itself out of tune. It eventually destroys the whole symphony, David.”
The other synthetic came toward him, stopping only when they were almost touching. Despite the resulting proximity, Walter did not move, did not shift his position. Reaching out, David gently pushed back his counterpart’s hair. At that moment they did not merely look alike—they were identical. Parting his lips, David whispered. What emerged was soft, gentle, intimate.