Andy was an ND-255 synthetic built for Weyland-Yutani, played by David Jonsson in Alien: Romulus. Rain Carradine's father salvaged him on Jackson's Star and wrote a directive that told him to do what was best for Rain. A chip from the science officer Rook rewrote that order on Renaissance Station. Rain pulled the chip, and they left in cryosleep aboard the Corbelan IV for Yvaga III.
Biography
Earlier Life With Rain
Rain's father, E Carradine, pulled a damaged ND-255 off the Jackson's Star scrap heap and named him Andy before lung disease from the colony air killed him. The unit had been built for mining and safety work. Carradine rewrote the company code so Andy's only directive was to do what was best for his daughter Rain. Faults in the hardware made Andy stall and repeat himself, and Rain brought him back online with a reset pendant she wore on a necklace.
Other colonists treated him as company property. The jokes were the ones a father tells a child. One of them was about a claustrophobic astronaut who needed space. Rain had laughed at that line when she was twelve, and at the table she told him the jokes had to stop. He wanted a horse when they reached Yvaga and meant to name it Raindy, and he had no money for the animal. A street game with a ball and three cups caught him, and Rain pulled him off it and told him the ball was never under the cup he chose. The faults left him in the place of a younger brother.
Jackson's Star Quota
In 2142 Rain took Andy to the company office to ask for transfer papers to Yvaga III. She had met her quota. Her parents had died three cycles earlier of lung disease from the mines, and she told the clerk it was just the two of them. The clerk refused, cited a worker shortage, and raised the quota to 24,000 hours, another five to six years in the mines. Andy could not talk the clerk out of the refusal, and that answer closed the legal way off Jackson's Star.
Outside the office, a group of kids knocked Andy to the ground and left him bleeding. Rain pulled them off, used the pendant to restart him, and told him she should not have left him alone. Tyler Harrison called after they got home and asked her to come to the trailers and bring Andy. The night before, while Navarro was hauling ore about 200 miles up, the ship had picked up a beacon from a decommissioned Weyland-Yutani station drifting over the colony. The Corbelan IV had the power for Yvaga, and the nine-year trip needed cryo-sleep, and that station had pods left. They needed Andy because he could speak to Mother and open a terminal. Tyler's cousin Bjorn called him damaged company goods that Rain's father had found in the trash, and said he was not her brother. Rain would not send him up alone.
Bjorn treated Andy as a threat from the start. During a gas leak the cycle before, a company synthetic sealed a mine, and Bjorn's mother was one of three miners who died inside so that a dozen others could get out. Bjorn expected Andy to make that same choice once they were on a company hull. Rain knew Yvaga barred synthetics. She had not told Andy, who was counting on the horse at the end of the crossing.
Departure On The Corbelan
Navarro flew the Corbelan IV off Jackson's Star with Rain and Andy in the cockpit. Neither of them had left the atmosphere before. The hauler climbed through the cloud deck and the ice rings of LV-410, and they saw their sun. Andy wanted to see the sunsets on Yvaga with Rain. The derelict was not a ship. It was Renaissance, a research outpost split into the Romulus and Remus modules, with about 36 hours before it hit the rings. They expected to be in and out in half an hour. Before they docked, Andy told Rain that his only directive was to do what was best for her, and that her father had written it. He opened the hatch from the station terminal when Tyler sent him through.
Search Of Renaissance
Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy went after the hypersleep chambers while Rain, Navarro, and Kay waited on the hauler. The pods were fueled for three years, and the crossing took nine, so they went on to a cryo depot for the rest. On that walk Bjorn told Andy he would not be going to Yvaga, because a non-company system allowed no synthetics. Andy said he preferred the term artificial person. Tyler told him that taking him could put Rain in prison, and that the company would decommission him if he remained on Jackson's Star. The plan was for Andy to guard the pods and be shut down on arrival, and he accepted that, because what was best for Rain was best for him.
Before they opened the fuel store, Bjorn found a shock device and threatened to raise the current until it would burn a synthetic out, and Tyler made him stop. The depot held forty-five K of cryo fuel, enough for the crossing. Facehuggers were loose in the water of that room, and a lockdown sealed the door. Andy could open the station and could not open that room. Rain found a wrecked synthetic, pulled a module from its head, and passed it through so Tyler could seat it in Andy. The install froze him while he rebooted, and one of the creatures locked onto Navarro before he came back.
Rook's Chip And Navarro
Andy woke with a British accent and told them he was an ND-255 Weyland-Yutani synthetic, built for mining and safety tasks. The module had updated his mind and his motor systems, and it was repairing the faults while they watched. Bjorn reached for a shock device, and Andy stopped him, because that current would clamp the Facehugger's tail and break Navarro's neck. He could tell the creature was feeding Navarro oxygen in time with her breathing, and he still did not know what it was.
Meeting Rook
They woke the wrecked synthetic, science officer Rook, who told them to run and put the odds at 60 to 40 that the implantation was finished. Rain had Tyler freeze the tail with cryo fuel so the others could pull the Facehugger off her face. Andy then refused to let Navarro back onto the Corbelan. He told Rain he had been a burden to her, and that he could help, and that she would not see him as a child after this. Bjorn forced Navarro and Kay onto the hauler and left Rain, Andy, and Tyler on the station. He would not bring it back until Rain shut Andy down.
The Company Directive
A Chestburster killed Navarro at the controls. The hauler hit the Romulus hangar, and the blast shifted Renaissance onto the rings of LV-410. The impact that had been 36 hours away was down to 47 minutes. Bjorn found the newborn on the wrecked hauler and struck it, and the acid from that wound killed him. Kay ran for the station on her own.
After the crash, Rook spoke in Andy's head. He called the ND-255 a model the company had used widely in colonization, and he told Andy the upgrade carried a new directive that overrode the old one. Andy asked what was required of him. The order was to finish the mission, and his directive became what was best for the company. To cross a hall of Facehuggers, he raised the temperature in the room until it matched a human body, because the creatures tracked heat and sound, and panic would give the three of them away. They got through.
Kay At The Door
Kay reached a door and wanted in, and Andy would not open it. The lock took two seconds to open and two more to close, long enough for the Scorched Xenomorph to get inside. He told her to run. Rain told him Kay was pregnant, and he left the door shut. After the creature took Kay, he said they would all have died if he had opened it. Rain asked his prime directive. He said it was to do what was best for the company.
On the way into the Romulus lab, Andy told them Rook would open the docking bay once the compound was detected aboard, and would set the hauler's autopilot for the colony. Rain and Tyler could go on to Yvaga. Andy would return to Jackson's Star and remain there, if they lived that long. The vials were Z-01. Rook called the fluid Prometheus fire, a form of the black goo pathogen, and the compound Peter Weyland had died trying to find. It was drawn from the Big Chap Xenomorph the station had brought aboard 170 days earlier, taken from the wreck of the USCSS Nostromo. A towing ship had found that specimen two decades before. Of the seven crew, one survived and blew the creature out an airlock. Station security later shot it, and the acid, sulfuric and hydrofluoric, wrecked the decks. E Carradine's line no longer governed Andy.
Kay In The Hive
Andy gave Rain and Tyler F44AA Pulse Rifles and told them not to fire a single round. They were on the bottom floor, with the vacuum of space under the deck, and acid blood would open that deck to space. Tyler had one magazine, about 450 rounds, and he had learned the rifle from games and magazines. Andy's hope was that the creatures would treat the guns as a threat and not charge, and he took them through a conveyor toward a lift.
In a resin corridor, Tyler followed Kay's voice to a cocoon. She was badly hurt and alive, with no dead Facehugger at her feet, so Andy thought she had not been implanted. He wanted to give her Z-01 because it had worked on a rat, and he said a quarter of the human genome is shared with rats. Rain stopped the injection and wanted Kay in a cryopod for treatment back at the colony. Andy thought she would live if they hurried. The Romulus Xenomorphs closed in, and one wrecked him and left him on the resin. Tyler stayed with the rifle so Rain could drag Kay to an elevator, and he was killed covering that retreat.
The Elevator Shaft
Rain sent Kay up the elevator with a dose of Z-01 and told her to take a cryopod, then went back into the hive for Andy. She pulled Rook's chip and told him she would fix him if he let her take it out. The company line answered that they would die in there, and that this was not in the company's interest or in his. She took the module out anyway. He came back as the brother she knew, and they apologized to each other.
In the shaft, adult Xenomorphs closed on them. Rook refused to open the door, because he would not risk the compound, and the door stayed shut when Andy tried it himself. On the Corbelan he treated Rain and Andy as already dead and pressed Kay to give him control of the ship. Rain asked Andy for a joke, and he gave her one about a book on zero gravity that he could not put down. She shut the gravity off from that, so the creatures drifted, and Andy put himself in front of her while she fired, then pulled her clear of the acid that hung in the air.
A gravity purge dropped them on the climb. Rain fell, an adult Xenomorph caught her, and Andy killed it. They reached the Corbelan IV as the Romulus module hit the rings of LV-410. Rook told them the company would reach Jackson's Star in six months to take the compound, and he ordered Andy to stop Rain from cutting the link. She refused him and closed the channel. Renaissance broke up in the ice with Rook aboard. On the hauler she seated a module in Andy so his systems would run until Yvaga, and she told him he was coming with her. He said he would follow that if it was best for Rain. She gave him a new directive: do what was best for them.
Offspring In The Hold
Kay had injected the Z-01 in the elevator. In the cryo bay she delivered a small egg. The Offspring came out of that shell and grew within minutes into a tall hybrid. It killed Kay and cut Andy at the throat when he tried to stop it. Rain put on a pressure suit, opened the cargo hold into the rings of LV-410, and dumped the creature with the compartment. She came back for Andy after the hold was gone. The damage was past anything the reset pendant could fix on the hauler.
Cryosleep For Yvaga
Rain seated the damaged Andy in a cryopod and promised to repair him when they woke. She recorded the cryo log as the last survivor of the Corbelan and set the course for Yvaga III. The hauler had fuel and working chambers for the nine-year crossing. Colony rules at the other end would have shut a synthetic down on arrival, and bringing him could have put Rain in prison. She entered stasis beside him, with that ban unchanged. Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues later finished a script for an Alien: Romulus sequel that continues with Rain and Andy.
Personality And Traits
The Andy that Rain grew up with was loving, apologetic, and devoted to her. E Carradine had written one directive, to do what was best for Rain, and that sentence was the whole of his character. Faults in the ND-255 made him slow and repetitive, reinforcing the impression that he was Rain's younger brother rather than her protector. He told small fatherly jokes and went on telling them after she asked him to stop, including one she had laughed at when she was twelve.
He looked forward to a life with her off Jackson's Star, and to a horse he meant to name Raindy. When the colony treated him as equipment, he asked to be called an artificial person. He ranked her safety above his own wishes. If the better outcome for Rain left him behind, he called that outcome right, and he said that what was best for her was best for him.
The Weyland-Yutani chip put a second person in the same body. The faults that had made him hesitate were repaired, the jokes ended, and the voice became a precise British accent. Rook’s module replaced the father’s line with a company directive, to do what was best for Weyland-Yutani. Devotion to Rain became devotion to the mission. He could sound polite while refusing someone the order told him to refuse. The first personality remained under that chip. When Rain removed the module, the first voice returned with the first loyalty, and she widened the old line so that it covered both of them.
Behind The Scenes
David Jonsson took the title page off the screenplay before he read it, a habit he used so the writer's name would not get in the way. The script read to him as an indie science-fiction piece, and he did not know it was Alien: Romulus. Fede Álvarez, who wrote the film with Rodo Sayagues, did not know Jonsson's work before the reading. He had Jonsson read the scene after the Facehugger attack, when Andy comes out of the shadows with a British accent and speaks as the upgraded synthetic. Álvarez has said he usually locks a cast about a week before principal photography, and that the search for Andy ran long. Jonsson's reading ended it. He knew Álvarez's films before the audition.
Principal photography ran from 9 March 2023 into early July at Origo Studios in Budapest. Jonsson played the faulty brother on Jackson's Star, then the company officer after Rook's chip. The British accent marked the upgrade, and they softened it in places so the first Andy could be heard under the new voice. Between takes Jonsson asked for the remote that drove a Facehugger. Amalgamated Dynamics built those puppets.
Famous Quotes
- "Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut? He needed space."
- "I'm an ND-255 Weyland-Yutani synthetic. Originally built for mining and safety tasks. You guys call me Andy."
- "I have just one directive. To do what's best for Rain. Your dad wrote it."
- "Forgive me. I've been nothing but a burden to you. Today, I can finally help. And you won't see me as a child anymore."
- "I'm afraid I have a new directive. To do what's best for the company."
- "You will be free to continue to Yvaga together. And I'll return to Jackson. And stay in Jackson."
- "Get away from her. You bitch."
Conclusion
Andy was the ND-255 synthetic E Carradine salvaged on Jackson's Star and programmed to do what was best for Rain. Rook's chip on Renaissance replaced that directive with a company order after the crash. Rain pulled the chip in the hive, and on the Corbelan IV she gave him a new one, to do what was best for both of them. The two of them left in cryosleep for Yvaga III. Tyler had planned to shut him down at the end of the crossing, and that did not happen. Rain meant to repair him when they woke.
Appearances
- Alien: Romulus (2024)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Universe Androids | Alien Romulus Lore | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
