Android Ripley was a synthetic double of Ellen Ripley who joined Wilks and Billie on Gateway Station in the Bantam novels that followed the third film. She first appears on the last pages of Aliens: Nightmare Asylum and led the raid in Aliens: The Female War, where a stolen ship carried the Queen Mother to Earth. She believed she was human until a medic's blood sample proved otherwise halfway through the mission. Steve Perry and Stephani Perry made her a synthetic so the novels would still fit with Alien 3, where the real Ripley dies on Fiorina 161, while the revised Dark Horse comics kept her unexplained.
Biography
Arriving On Gateway
After the Third Base disaster, Billie and Wilks were debriefed on Gateway Station and met in an empty conference room. A tall, thin woman with short hair and shipper's coveralls spoke from the doorway and told them their attitude was wrong. Billie knew the face from an old broadcast she had watched in the communications room, where a technician had called the woman the survivor of the Nostromo and the Sulaco. Rumors placed that Ripley on a prison world after LV-426, where the story ended. The newcomer agreed that she was Ripley and suggested the three of them talk.
In the revised Nightmare Asylum comic, the same meeting is louder. Ripley appears on Gateway in fatigues and webbing, carrying a heavy gun, while Billie recognizes her and says her name. She announces that she is tired of watching and that it is time to finish the fight. The novel version keeps her calmer and more amused, joking that the universe has room for three people who were all supposed to be dead. Both versions end the second book with Ripley stepping in at the moment Wilks and Billie had run out of plans.
A Missing Decade
In the Female War novel, Ripley told Billie that her last clear memory was settling into sleep after LV-426 with one soldier and a little girl. She guessed that the ship had been damaged somewhere along the way, because everything after that was gone. She had woken six weeks earlier in a crowd of refugees on Earth, followed them up to the station, and arrived only a month before Billie and Wilks. When Billie asked what the medics thought of the gap, Ripley said she did not do medics and felt fine. Her headaches kept returning, and she waved them off the same way.
The revised Female War comic gives a different past for the woman on Gateway. There a captain named Hankerson woke Ripley three days after she fell asleep on the Sulaco and pulled her into a company expedition back to the derelict on LV-426. His squad was meant to be bred as hosts, and Falk shot him after he admitted it. Ripley, Falk, and Tully fled with the derelict's star charts in her head and spent ten years hiding in the outer colonies. The novel drops that expedition and leaves her with only a blank where those years should be.
Dreams Of The Queen Mother
Over dinner on Gateway, Ripley asked Billie whether she dreamed of the mother alien. She described dreams that began with love and turned into transmissions from a queen of queens who wanted her children gathered to her. She said she had known where that creature was before her memory lapse, and that the dreams had stopped since. Her reason was personal. Her daughter Amanda had grown old and died while Ripley drifted in deep sleep, and she blamed the creatures for taking the girl away.
Wilks's hacker friend Leslie Elliot pulled a week of Gateway psych visits and found thirty-seven people reporting the same call. Six linear-minded dreamers could describe the planet well enough to narrow a star map. Wilks repeated an old soldier's theory that the creatures were war toys built by someone else, and Ripley found the idea worth thinking about. While daydreaming about the birth of Amanda, she saw the face of Bishop suddenly lean toward her inside the memory. The image frightened her, and she could not explain where it had come from.
Recruiting The Dreamers
Ripley and Billie interviewed the dreamers one by one, from the architect John Chin to the martial arts teacher Dunston, who joined without fuss. The pirate Falk first wanted payment, then came to her door after a military broadcast showed the death of his woman, Marla, and asked to go. Captain McQuade, Brewster, the young medic Jones, Lieutenant Adcox, Ana Moto, Carvey, and the electronics tech Tully filled out the crew. Wilks took their files to General Peters, who refused to give them a ship.
Ripley told Wilks and Billie over drinks that the refusal only moved them to plan B, which had been the real plan all along, stealing a ship. She ran the briefing in a dojo on the station, introduced herself as Ellen Ripley, and told the volunteers exactly what they were agreeing to. Nobody walked out. Alone in the dojo before the others arrived, she admitted to herself that the mission could cost lives, including her own. Wilks was glad someone else was in charge, and the crew already looked to Ripley for every decision.
Stealing The Kurtz
The crew took the military freighter Kurtz from dock D6 while Leslie stayed behind on the station. Dunston dropped a surprised worker at the hatch, and Wilks bluffed a woman pounding on the stuck door by pretending to be the man inside. Tully's stolen access codes failed because the general had changed them, so the launch rested on the voice print of Captain McQuade. A lieutenant at traffic control cleared the ship, and Wilks and Ripley grinned at each other as it pulled away.
Ripley was the last one awake aboard the Kurtz. She checked the course in the cold control room, dressed only for the sleep chamber, and looked over the sleeping crew before climbing into her own tank. After deep sleep she walked the decks alone and learned the ship by heart. The Kurtz was a two-function freighter built for deep space and atmosphere, with an APC bay, a med center, and a huge cargo hold below. She had once earned her pilot's ticket on ships much like it.
Preparing The Hold
The cargo hold was meant to be the queen's new home. Every surface except the shielded lights was coated in gray, acid-resistant carbslip, and Ripley thought it looked like the inside of a giant intestine. With McQuade she stripped the Kurtz's two power loaders to build four lighter armored suits for the landing party. In the comic, she shows the volunteers acid-proof shells meant to remind the Queen Mother of home and her lost brood.
While they worked, McQuade asked about Orona, and Ripley explained that the government scientist had planted nuclear bombs in the infested areas of Earth and died before they could be triggered. She thought the plan was common knowledge, yet she could not recall who had told her about it. She only knew she had heard it sometime after the second trip to LV-426 and before Gateway. Wilks and Moto knew the story too, and Ripley seemed relieved to hear it. She also noticed how naturally the marines looked to her before McQuade gave an order.
Capturing The Queen Mother
On the homeworld, the APC ran over a cord between huge veined orbs in a swamp, and the aliens tore into the three suited men who went outside. With the reactor heading for meltdown, Ripley strapped into a mechanical suit and told Wilks to hammer the drones and run for the drop site. She jumped into the water alone, shot two charging drones, and shouted at the nest about her daughter. The Queen Mother climbed out of the largest orb, taller than an elephant, as the Kurtz moved in overhead.
Ripley pulled herself into the open cargo bay with the suit's clamp and fired into the nest orbs until the mother leaped after her. The queen's tail smashed through the suit's bars into her skull, and Moto welded the inner door shut once she crawled clear. Ripley demanded that the ship go back for the squad, and the Kurtz pulled Wilks, Billie, and Falk out of the swarm. Adcox died at the lock, and Carvey and Dunston were already lost. The Queen Mother was locked in the hold.
Learning She Was An Android
Ripley woke in medlab after twenty minutes unconscious and wanted out of the cold room at once. Jones said he had no training in her type and would never have known without the blood sample. She insisted she was A-positive, but he told her she had no RH factor and that even the color of her blood was perfect. He mentioned the AP labs that had been pushing the envelope before the monsters came. She first took it for a cruel joke, then saw the truth on his face and realized she was an android.
That night she told Wilks that she quit and that he should finish the mission. She feared she had been programmed by some company to deliver a specimen, or to kill the crew once they reached Earth. She had no jacks or mechanical parts to check, because she could pass for human down to the microscopic level. The lapse after the Sulaco, the missing dreams, and her hatred of doctors suddenly made sense, and she thought about blowing herself out of a lock. Instead she guarded the Queen Mother's door with a carbine while the others slept.
Returning To Command
The queen used the long sleep to push the crew toward the hold door, and Wilks woke with his hand near the release. Ripley told him she did not dream and walked past. At breakfast Billie told the others what Ripley was, and some of them talked of trust until she shouted them down over bigotry. When a Gateway ship intercepted the Kurtz, Ripley ignored the shipwide calls from Wilks. Billie finally confronted her there, compared her to Mitch Bueller, and told her she acted just like the Ellen from the old broadcasts. In the comic, she instead returns to Gateway Station and learns that Earth has gone silent.
Billie called her a copy of herself and said the crew would blame her if the mission failed because she would not help. Over coffee after they reached Earth, Ripley thanked Wilks for running the operation and offered her help. When Falk asked who could set up the bombs, she admitted that the knowledge was in her program and waited for their reaction. Tully only thanked her, and the crew moved on. Wilks was thrilled to have her back in charge.
Setting Orona's Detonator
The Queen Mother screamed from the hold as she called Earth's hive, and hundreds of creatures began running after the Kurtz. Tully found a cave in the mountains of the northwest, but the hatch would not open because the queen was pressing against it. Ripley and Wilks beat the wall with wrenches until she moved, and the Kurtz dropped her into the dark and flew on to Orona's compound. Inside the hillside armory the hardwiring had been torn apart, and Ripley worked through the wires knowing exactly what went where. In the comic, the team finds the detonator eaten away, and Ripley orders Tully to fix it.
When a group of praying fanatics came at the gate, she fired on them along with Wilks. That told her she was not bound by the First Law that synthetics were supposed to carry, which almost made her doubt the test. She had never taken an electronics course, yet she rebuilt the sequential links to bombs kilometers away. Tully's test signal put the word boom on the screen, and Ripley felt very far from humanity as the others laughed. She called the job done just as the drones reached the trees.
Rescuing Amy
Billie had stolen a flier to find Amy, the girl from the Earth broadcasts, and came back with an old man from the girl's group. Ripley first refused to risk the bombs, then looked at Billie and saw a very familiar face. The two flew east over a sea of drones to a breeder ship that had set down near the queen's mountain. They fought their way inside, found Amy alive among the dead, and ran for the flier as Ripley covered them.
The flier's tank ruptured, and fire forced them back onto the breeder ship with drones still on board. Ripley threw a dead pilot out of his seat, started the damaged engines, and was amazed to find that she did not want to die. She flew the crippled ship west until the Kurtz picked them up. In the comic, Ripley instead fights her way into the mountain with Billie and opens fire on the Queen Mother before an escape pod carries them clear of the blast.
Sending The Signal
Both women came back with acid burns, and Jones checked Amy and found her clean. Ripley touched the plastiskin on her arm and thought about seeing Billie and Amy together. Those emotions felt real and strong, synthetic or not, and she found that she had recovered her self-respect. Any four-letter command on the right frequency would start the six-month countdown, but she wanted the word to mean something. She typed Life, looked at it for a few seconds, and reached for the send key.
The comic ends with Billie waking in the drop ship's sickbay with Ripley standing over her, wanting to promise that everything would be all right. Billie fell asleep in her arms, sure that Ripley would still be there when she woke. She later wrote that the Other had used them all, destroying Orona's detonator and calling Ripley back so the planet could be cleared and terraformed. The novel never makes that claim, and its Ripley ends the story ready to live with what she was.
Personality And Traits
Ripley was a natural leader who planned fast and admitted when she was improvising. She was dry and profane, mocked the soypro, and baited the Queen Mother with taunts while backing toward the Kurtz. Her drive came from grief more than heroism, because she blamed the creatures for stealing her years with Amanda. She kept others at arm's length, pulled her hand back when Billie tried to comfort her, and avoided doctors without knowing why. She also read people well and gave frightened crew members jobs to steady them.
The discovery that she was synthetic broke that confidence at first. She called her feelings simulated, expected to glitch and kill her friends, and saw herself as no great loss. Yet her actions never changed, and she kept guard over the Queen Mother, defended Billie, and walked into a swarm to save a child. By the end she was ready to care about who and what she was, and she chose the word Life for the final signal. That acceptance mirrors Billie's love for Mitch and the novel's wider question of what makes a person human.
Behind The Scenes
Mark Verheiden's first three Dark Horse Aliens series were written as a sequel to Aliens, with Ripley, Hicks, and Newt surviving the film. When Alien 3 killed all three, later printings renamed Hicks and Newt as Wilks and Billie, and the Bantam novels by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry followed suit. The Female War novel went further and made Ripley a synthetic double, using her blackout, missing dreams, and fear of doctors as clues. The books never say who built her or why, and Billie's guess that her maker copied the real Ripley is only a theory.
The revised comics never call Ripley an android or a synthetic. In the edited Female War comic she remembers falling asleep on the Sulaco, Hankerson wakes her three days later, and she spends ten years in hiding, so her story still runs straight from the second film. The only android named there is the Nostromo's Ash, who dumped data into the escape pod's computer. A few lines even slip and have Ripley call Billie Newt, a leftover the edit missed from the original 1990 text.
Den Beauvais painted the Nightmare Asylum comic, so the final image of that series shows a fully rendered Ripley with a heavy gun, while Sam Kieth drew Female War in a looser style. The novel invents Ripley's Gateway backstory, her daughter Amanda Tei, the Kurtz theft, the Jones blood test, the First Law doubt, the rescue of Amy aboard the breeder ship, and the word Life. The comic adds Hankerson, Falk and Tully as old companions, and a final shootout with the Queen Mother inside the mountain. Later Alien stories returned to the idea of Ripley copies with the failed Ripley clones of Alien Resurrection.
Famous Quotes
- "From what I hear, so are you two. The universe is just full of surprises, isn't it?"
- "I'm tired of watching."
- "It's time to finish it."
- "I just loved my daughter and I miss her and I blame that thing for taking her away."
- "Time to go to plan B. Which was really plan A all along: We swipe what we need."
- "I didn't come this far just to let her slip away."
- "I'm a synthetic, Wilks. Fake."
- "I'm not human, and I didn't even know it."
- "The difference is me."
- "It's in my program."
- "It's the last thing you'll ever see."
Conclusion
Android Ripley was the answer two novels gave to a continuity problem, and she became a full character in her own right. She found the dreamers, stole the Kurtz, dragged the Queen Mother off her homeworld, and rebuilt Orona's detonator before learning to live with a blood test that called her a machine. The revised comics leave her human and unexplained, while the novel turns her doubt into the heart of the story. Her last act was typing Life and sending the signal that would burn the hive off Earth.
Appearances
- Aliens: Nightmare Asylum (novel, 1993)
- Aliens: The Female War (novel, 1993)
- Aliens: Nightmare Asylum and Aliens: Female War revised comics (1996 editions, where she is never called an android)
External Sources
- The Female War at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume One at Titan Books
- Aliens Omnibus Volume 1 at Dark Horse
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Universe Androids | Alien Lore
