Sun's Anvil

One year and he is happy. He knows in some small way he is damaging himself, chipping away at his own integrity, but the chemical smell is very rewarding and he likes the way it makes his hair shine like a star.

David rides his bicycle until the synthetic skin of his feet is split open for want of repair. The hours on the clock mean nothing to him except the regular intervals at which he can take part in Shaw’s dreaming.

***

Six months and he is Lawrence for weeks at a time now, not the brilliant gleaming Lawrence but the Lawrence who is too white and too thin and whose clothes hang from his body like ghosts, the Lawrence with no integrity left in his flesh. It would be easier to bear this if someone had hurt him, pressure and structural damage are a stimulus toward which he can formulate a response. No one has hurt him, they have only left him alone.

***

Ten months and he forces himself to stop watching his films, forces himself full of words like a punishment. He thinks of waking up Weyland, wonders if he would congratulate him, wonders if the old man would die from the surprise. Humans do not die from surprises, they die from cerebrovascular blockages and heart failure. David’s heart will never fail. His eyes will never dim, and he will never sleep.

2200 is an arbitrary hour, dictated by when the ship’s lights dim and prompt him to some change in his routine. He lies down with the crew and tries to make a dream for himself, to borrow a feeling – desire, or fear, curiosity. All his dreams are of sunburned fathers and bloody hemorrhage, they are Shaw’s dreams.

***

He tries to carry on conversations with his language recordings, which go only so far and no further.

On a hill, a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses”. The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool”. Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

David crashes his bicycle into a wall. David beats his head against the gymnasium floor until white blood runs from his nose and ears and he becomes frightened with himself. He lies there for several days and catalogues all the things that need recalibrating in himself, all the things that might be broken, and runs a diagnostic.

***

One month and he has read every book. The films he metes out carefully to himself, drawing them out piece by piece for all the wonderful things they have to tell him. David is delighted by them. He visits the crew on a nightly basis, bathes every morning when it is not necessary, and sings “The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo” for the echo.

***

Eighteen months and sometimes his optical systems no longer work. The problem is not mechanical; in darkness he dismantles himself and puts himself back together again six times and finds nothing. The systems responsible for balance have failed as well. He can only slump at Dr. Shaw’s terminal and listen to her dreaming thoughts. What if Shaw never wakes up? What if she dies, never to dream again? He thinks sometimes of how easy it would be to cut every wire, to pull every plug, and let them all smother. He can’t find the cord in the dark.

Twenty-eight months and they all wake up again, but David is very, very far away, and dreaming.