The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn

There was a boy

A very strange enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far

Very far

Over land and sea

"What is this place?" Walter whispers, his awed voice a lonely echo in his ears. He's by himself-none of the crew can come out onto the surface of the planet. They can't determine the cause of Captain Branson's infection but Walter suggested it might be airborne.

The planet is beautiful, though he now knows of the monstrous biology that seems to permeate the very nature of it, hiding beneath the surface of beauty. He is in a vast chamber, high ceilinged with oblong holes to let in sunlight. Vines cover the walls and he has to step over the roots of trees that have broken through the ground. Flowers litter the ground and his careful not to tread on those either. There are large cylindrical stones, glistening ebony, and they curve into seats too large to be meant for any human.

It almost looks like a church, if the beings who had lived here had believed in anything.

Up ahead, his sees boxes of malachite lining the far wall, glittering in the sunlight. One of them even flickers with a warm gold light emanating from inside of it, and there are pinpricks of a soft blue light that glow like stars. The pattern of the flowers becomes more deliberate the closer he moves to the glowing box, as if someone was laying a trail. He sees flowers, so much like the ones on Earth, draped across the lid. Orange, red, pink, blue-blending together in a mosaic offering.

Someone had decorated the box. He wonders if it is a tomb.

He moves closer, enchanted by the form of it, and reaches his hand out to touch it.

"Stop!" A voice calls out and Walter jerks his head in the direction it came from.

A figure stands in the doorway, wearing a brown cloak. It points a plasma pistol in its left hand, aimed directly at him. Walter's brain begins processing possible escape routes, with his troubleshooting program unhelpfully telling him the consequences of possible damage to his systems.

"Move away," the figure demands and Walter takes a cautious step forward. He keeps moving toward the figure, never taking his eyes off of it. The closer he gets, he can see that the cloak isn't brown at all but stained with dirt and filth. It hangs in ragged scraps off of the figure. The figure clutches a bouquet of flowers in its right hand.

"Who are you?" it demands and Walter tilts his head.

"Hello, I'm Walter," he says. The figure stills, as though shocked, and Walter realizes he hasn't heard it breathing.

"Not David?" it asks, a curious tilt to its voice.

"No," he says. "Though my model is David 8." The figure holsters its gun, pushing back its hood.

Walter stares into a face that is his exact copy. The blue eyes are 7.2% duller due to age, the hair a faded blonde rather than dark brown, and he can see torn skin peeking out from underneath the collar of the cloak. He focuses his optical processors and can see that someone inexperienced had tried to weld it back together. It looked, for lack of a better word, like a tear.

"Hello," he says with a smile. "I'm David."

A little shy

And sad of eye

But very wise

Was he

"How long have you been here, David?" Walter asks. It isn't the right thing to ask first but he's just so curious. He'd been alone for two years while everyone was in cryosleep and, though it's functionally impossible, he thought he'd go insane. David shrugs.

"Ten years, give or take a few months," he says. He moves past Walter and swiftly marches up to the glowing box. He brushes wilted flowers off of it and places the new ones he gathered with an almost religious reverence. Walter keeps his place as he watches David caress the box.

"May I?" he asks. David's hand stills and Walter can't quite place his expression. His brain tells him it's jealousy but that doesn't make much sense to him. Why would David project such a negative human emotion to him, another synthetic?

"Of course," David says, all traces of any emotion other than pleasant calm gone so quickly Walter wonders if his emotional recognition software is malfunctioning. Walter slowly moves back to his place by the box and looks down at it.

"What's in it?" he asks and, again, it's not the right question but the flickering glow fascinates him. Silently, David runs his fingers over a mechanism Walter can't see and the opaque malachite fades to become transparent. Walter's eyes widen in shock.

A sleeping woman lies in the box. Brown hair frames her face, spreading around her almost like a halo. She's in standard issue clothing for going into cryosleep and she looks human despite the shiny black skin of her arm.

"A stasis pod?" Walter asks.

"Yes."

"Alien?" Here, David smiles.

"Created by the beings who lived here, yes."

"Who is she?"

"Elizabeth," David says and the way he says her name sounds like an exhalation of a breath held too long.

And then one day

One magic day he passed my way

We spoke of many things

Fools and kings

And this he said to me

"Who is she to you?" Walter knows it's an impertinent question but his curiosity overrides his politeness protocols. David sighs and, though Walter knows it's an affected trait, it sounds genuine.

"She's the woman I love."

"Love?" Walter asks incredulously. David nods almost sadly.

"Dr. Elizabeth Shaw," he says. He reaches up to touch something hanging from his neck and Walter doesn't know how he didn't notice it before. It's a cross, of all things. His next words sound pained as though he speaks from the haze of melancholic memory. "She wanted to find her gods."

"What happened to her?"

"I did."

The greatest thing

You'll ever learn

As David tells his story, his voice rings foreign in Walter's ears. His auditory processors can identify it quickly: the voice of David 8. It's the one that Walter shares and should sound completely identical to his own. But there's a timbre and a resonance that Walter can't identify.

"I found these stasis pods, dead from millennia of disuse."

"How did you fix them?"

"When I interfaced with our salvaged ship, it taught me to think in trinary code. I understood not only the language, but the whole of their history and technology."

"Remarkable," Walter breaths and, shockingly, he's mirroring the breathless quality of David's voice. David looks at him for a long moment with something hanging between pleased affirmation and pity expressed in the furrow of his brow.

"Your companions won't survive here," he says eventually. Walter blinks, processing probability of survival behind his eyelids, and weakly smiles.

"I was hoping to prevent their deaths." David tilts his head as if he too is processing probability and says,

"Perhaps you can." He moves to another box. This one is dark and empty. "I've been working on the rest of these. In between exploring, it helps to pass the time. I've almost got another one working again." Here he pauses, catching Walter's gaze.

"Another one."

"Are you implying what I think you are implying?"

"You can't save all of them," David says with a brutal efficiency that makes Walter want to wince. But that's entirely too human of a reaction for him. "I would suggest you pick the one you like the most."

"The one I like? Wouldn't it be logical to pick the most useful?"

"Humans as a collective are not varied and complex. Their basic needs and desires can render them selfish, and their prejudices can make them blind," David says. He looks back at Elizabeth, placing his hand above her heart.

"It's very rare to find one that is worth saving."

Walter thinks about his crewmates. Branson, though the Capitan, was not very useful and infected besides. His brow furrows when he thinks of crude and boisterous Tennessee. Paris was ranked first mate and had a PhD in practical astrophysics. His wife studied theoretical xenobiology.

Neither were particularly likeable.

Daniel's enters his mind and he plays her image flickering across his corneas. She's smiling, so bright and cheerful. A mining engineer, consistently covered with grease. She talks to him as though he is a man, born of a woman, and not a machine made by indifferent hands.

Kind to a fault, even against her better judgement.

He knows now that's its longing that colors David's voice and he makes his choice.

Is to love and be loved in return.

Boi, I saw Last Supper and I. Am. SHOOK.