We’d always get together before going under ice, and though most of us had done it a dozen times or more, hypersleep still made plenty of us anxious. To relax our nerves, we’d have one last meal together, and someone would always make the joke that it could be our last. We’d smile or shake our heads or just swallow whatever tasteless garbage was on the menu. At this point, we were well past laughing.
We’d watch a movie before hitting the freeze tanks. We’d converge in the ship’s cinema room, cramped like sardines, and partake in a film before our multi-month snooze in beds that reached a cozy -200 °C. It was Chip’s turn to pick a flick. In bad taste, he chose Alien. It’s a great movie, so there’s that. But the opening scene is a mining crew in space waking up from hypersleep to find out they are only halfway home. What is worse, they have woken to a distress call on some foreboding rock that ends up having a surplus of horrific, hostile lifeforms, one which becomes a stowaway in John Hurt’s guts before breaking through his ribcage to become a stowaway on their ship, growing at an alarmingly rapid pace, killing them all, one by one, some quicker than others, none in ways that you’d call merciful. Anyways, Chip snickered throughout the whole thing. To be frank, we are a little bored with his antics. Whose idea was it to have an android installed with a morbid sense of humor?
James Cameron movies are generally a faux pas while traveling in space. Too many tough-guy, macho men dying, spewing out roll-your-eyes lines from a script that couldn’t be saved by the budget that allocated for numerous explosions, top-of-the-line CG that nonetheless ventured into uncanny valley. For that reason, Aliens, the follow up to Ridley Scott’s original, was removed from the franchise collection on board. Not overly keen for some deep sleep in deep freeze, most of us were jonesing for a double feature. I pushed for something light, a romcom or a Christmas movie; When Harry Met Sally or Home Alone. Chip wagged his synthetic finger at me and went straight for the third installment.
At the start of Alien 3 –I’m talking really early on, like, before the opening credits even come to a close– a little girl who survived trauma and countless near-death experiences in the previous film dies before getting a chance to utter a single line, killed in her sleep in the cold confines of her cryo pod. Honestly, Chip needs a good rewiring.
Did I mention the android goes bonkers in the original? Ian Holm has a short-circuit, goes completely haywire. In this regard, it resembles his role in The Lord of the Rings, when Bilbo loses his shit over something so very small yet undeniably precious. His face goes all CG and scary for just a split second when he tries to take the ring back from Frodo. What’s with Ian Holm, anyways? In how many roles does he forget to take his medication? In Alien, he rolls up a dirty magazine and tries to force-feed it to Sigourney Weaver. This is after he lets the alien onboard. Frodo never would have made it to Mount Doom if Bilbo pulled that sort of shit. Middle Earth would have fallen.
I’m looking sidelong at Chip, who is now suggesting we watch a third film. “Just one more,” he begs, and I swear his voice goes a bit tinny, totally unnatural. Others are looking at him too, looking at each other. We are all communicating without words. Like binary code, sort of, but not at all. We are saying without saying: this robot is having a major malfunction. And almost as if reading our minds, Chip reaches for Full Metal Jacket. I can almost hear the sergeant shouting those demeaning, hurtful words to his overworked marine cadets: “What’s your major malfunction, Numbnuts? Didn’t Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” In the end, he pulls out Lost in Space. Maybe it’s unfair to blame Chip for his shortcomings. He didn’t have the benefit of having parents as a child. He didn’t have the benefit of being a child at all.
We decide to call it a night –though honestly, in space, morning and night are one in the same– and leave the cinema on a bit of a sour note. We each hop into our designated beds, a little bit dehumanized by the crew numbers painted on the outside panels that denote who we are, more than a little bit apprehensive of the deep freeze that we face. Chip stays “awake” –online– to monitor us while we sleep, to wake us when the time is ripe, when we’ve traversed a sea of stars. As the lamented glass lowers into place, as the frosted lids hiss like cobras with their airtight seals, we hear a muffled adieu, a seriously fucked up robot farewell, a voice like live-wires dipped in Sriracha. Totally volatile, totally demented.
“Goodnight, my little flesh angels,” Chip says as my vision goes foggy. “In space,” he happily quotes the famous tagline, “no one can hear you scream.”
It is then that I recall the prequels, the betrayal of the android, Michael Fassbender, as he puts the sole survivor to bed in her cryo pod, how he reveals his ill-intention as the machine turns her world into ice, as her consciousness fades, freezes, moments after she realizes, too late, that she has been double-crossed. Through a glass shell opaque with frost I see Chip hover above me. Or maybe it’s just a dream.
Maybe it was all just a dream.