Alien: Isolation

Chapter One: Wakeup Call

The first sound she heard was the hiss of atmosphere being exchanged, and as her eyes opened, she could see the blurry motion of a transparent hatch moving up away from her. Letting out a soft moan as she started to move, her body felt sluggish and heavy, but this feeling was slowly starting to lessen by the time she was able to sit up. And sit there she did, spending the next two or three minutes remaining where she was, while her vision slowly focused on the well illuminated room around her.

It was a hypersleep chamber that Amanda Ripley found herself in; a large one that contained several pods like the one she currently occupied, but the others were all vacant. This was good, since she had never been thrilled with the idea of big groups of people seeing her in nothing but her underwear, even though for some reason it was part of the standard procedure involving long-term space travel. The company claimed that it was necessary to achieve stasis safely, but more likely it was simply the idea of whatever lonely man had created the devices, in order to get a free peep-show.

By this time her body was responding almost completely, so Ripley used the pod as support so that she could get to her feet, and took it slow until there was no longer a risk of falling over. The short trip to her locker was good practice for this, since she had to go there anyway in order to get her clothes, and also because it was only a few steps away. So far everything was working again, and the last of the lingering fatigue was fading away as she stepped into her jumpsuit, zipping it up and remarking how much her face looked like her mother's when she caught a glimpse of it in the mirror.

Well, at least how she remembered her mother's face the last time she had seen her, but that had been a very long time ago. It had actually been during a brief video call, in which her mother had promised to be home in time for her eleventh birthday, but this was a promise that would not be kept. Shortly after, Ellen Ripley, along with her ship, the Nostromo, and the rest of the crew… simply vanished. No traces of the ship were ever found during the searches along its original flight path, and eventually all efforts were stopped, as they were not profitable for the company.

But that didn't mean that the younger Ripley was going to give up, and that was one of the prime reasons for her presence onboard this ship, the Torrens. Now in her mid-twenties, Ripley had become an engineer for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and as the expansion of colonized worlds continued to spread, she requested any assignment that would take her along the Nostromo's flight path in the hopes that she would one day find something; wreckage, a flight recorder, anything that would give her some answers about why she had to grow up without a mother, especially after her father had walked out on them when she was three.

She had been working the late shift, not that there was any real difference in space where everything was always dark, doing a patch-weld on some old pipes that honestly didn't have much life left in them, when she had been approached by a man named Christopher Samuels. Well, he wasn't a man, technically… he was one of the latest models of Synthetics; androids who worked for the company. He had been polite and friendly when he approached her, but after the company had done basically nothing to help find her mother, Ripley's first instinct was to give him the cold-shoulder and return to work.

However, this attitude was changed when the Synthetic revealed that the long-lost Nostromo's flight recorder had been found floating in space near an old mining station called Sevastopol. One of the work crews had reportedly recovered it, and reported the discovery to the company, so naturally a small recovery team was organized to retrieve it, and Samuels wanted to offer her a spot. So the next day she, Samuels, and a Weyland-Yutani Executive Administrator named Nina Taylor boarded an old M-Class commercial freighter, the Torrens, where the Captain, Diane Verlaine, and her small crew would transport them.

The funny thing about hypersleep was that it allowed no perception of time passing, so for Ripley, it felt like only a couple minutes had passed since climbing into the pod, and waking up in her current location, which she presumed was near this Sevastopol Station. Now dressed, and no longer feeling fatigued, Ripley left the hypersleep chamber, and moved into the corridor, where the lights were already on. This meant that there were people moving around somewhere, since these ships had motion sensors that automatically turned the lights on and off in order to save power.

The first person she encountered was Samuels. Well, not really encountered, and more like nearly walking into as he was coming out of the Torrens' medical bay. Behind him, nothing looked like it had been touched in the sterile-white room, but it was no surprise to find him wandering around, since he didn't exactly need as much rest as the rest of them.

"Hello, Ripley." He said politely. "How did you sleep?"

"Good, Samuels." She replied as he finished moving into the corridor. "Taking a walk, are you?"

Some might have found her question a little accusatory, if not somewhat rude, but not Samuels. The Synthetic just casually explained how he was taking a little tour of the Torrens' facilities, and even remarked that it was a well put together vessel, in spite of its age. Of course, Ripley couldn't help but notice how similar it looked to the Nostromo, or at least, to how it looked in the background of the pictures of her mother and her crew that she still had from before.

"How is Ms. Taylor doing?" Samuels continued, changing the subject. "You know, she isn't as seasoned of a space traveler as we are, and I'm afraid that she might find the after effects of hypersleep to be somewhat… discomforting."

It was incredibly obvious that he was using the third member of their team to distract her, but the thought was nice, so she agreed to go check on Taylor, and left Samuels to continue his little tour. The ship wasn't very big, so it wasn't long before Ripley found her sitting in the mess hall, looking pretty miserable when she walked in. Most people who were used to hypersleep got pretty hungry afterwards, but Taylor didn't look like she would be eating anything soon. Of course, there had been a time when long-term space travel made Ripley feel the same way, and now she understood why it had been funny to the more experienced workers at the time.

"Good morning, Taylor." She said, sitting down with her. "How are you feeling?"

"Like death." Taylor moaned, her head down on the table, with arms muffling her voice. "How do you people do this on a regular basis?"

The honest truth was that most of them didn't have a choice, since they weren't lucky enough to be able to afford the formal education that was required to become an upper level administrator in the company, but not wanting to be rude, Ripley simply reassured her that she would get used to it. She also wondered why someone like Taylor would be sent on this mission anyway, but then again the Nostromo's disappearance had probably cost the company a lot of money, and there was sure to be a whole mess of legal nonsense to be tended to. Taylor was also sure to look good to her superiors if she closed a case like this, but there was no more time for talking as an announcement came over the intercom for all personnel to report to the bridge.

"Looks like we're here." Ripley said as she stood up. "Come on, Taylor."

"No, not yet." Taylor groaned, weakly resisting Ripley's efforts to pull her to help her stand. "I'll be sick if I stand, I know it. Ripley, I'll get sick on you, I'm not joking."

But she didn't get sick, instead just having to lean heavily on her as Ripley guided them back down the corridor. What most people who were new to hypersleep didn't know, was that moving around was the fastest way to recover, which meant resisting the urge to just sit there and feel nauseous. This was helping Taylor as well, and this was good because there would have been no way for Ripley to carry her up the ladder to the upper deck. Taylor was still a little shaky as they made their way up, and thankfully she didn't fall off the ladder, since that would have meant crashing into Ripley, and as a result both of them falling to the floor.

"Well, look who decided to join us." Captain Verlaine said as they entered the bridge. "Hope you slept well, in spite of the pods not exactly being current. See, this tub was a wreck when I bought it, and it took a lot of contracts to refit… but it's pretty rare that someone gets sick enough to…

The Captain's words were interrupted as Taylor suddenly pushed away from Ripley before stumbling sideways, falling to her hands and knees, and vomiting onto the floor. Everyone on the bridge had now become silent, and Ripley didn't know what she was going to say to smooth this over, since the Captain was sure to be upset.

"We have a winner." Verlaine announced happily. "All right, the pot goes to me and anyone else who bet on Taylor… the rest of you losers pay up."

The crew then began to trade items like cigarettes and other things, causing an equal mixture of pleased and disappointed comments until even Verlaine took her share of what was being traded. One of the crewmembers who had lost then went to retrieve a mop in order to clean up the mess, and Ripley couldn't help but laugh when she realized what had happened. Taylor, on the other hand, was not very happy.

"You had a running pool for who would get sick?" She demanded while using the wall to pull herself to her feet. "And you all bet on me?"

"I bet on Samuels, if it makes you feel any better." One of the crew replied. "Of course, at the time I didn't know he was a Synthetic, so I guess I screwed that one up, huh?"

A couple minutes later the incident was forgotten, except maybe by Taylor, who still seemed a bit flustered. Ripley thought about trying to explain to her that such things were more a rite of passage than an insult in deep space, but somehow she didn't think that Taylor would understand, so she just kept quiet until another member of the crew announced that they were coming within visual range of the gas giant known as KG-348. This swirling yellow and brown planet was the body that the station orbited, since it had originally been constructed to refine the gas into usable resources.

"I can't see the station." Samuels said as he looked out the front window.

"We're not in visual range yet, but you can watch the approach on the monitors." Verlaine replied. "Okay, helm… take us in."