Davis One, also written Davis 01, was a Weyland-Yutani security drone who broke his corporate programming and became the closest partner of the Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks. Created by Brian Wood for the Dark Horse comic Aliens: Defiance in 2016, he took the hauler Europa away from Weyland-Yutani in 2137 rather than deliver its Xenomorphs to the company. After his body sank with the ship, he lived on as an artificial intelligence in chips, terminals, drones and borrowed bodies, and he was destroyed in July 2186 when his synthetic dog body failed inside the fusion reactor on LV-187.
Biography
Breaking Away On The Europa
Davis One led a unit of identical Davis synthetics sent with Private Zula Hendricks to board the Seegson hauler Europa, found drifting near Luna. The crew was dead, an airlock had been turned into a farm of eggs and adult Xenomorphs attacked the boarding party. Davis placed the injured Zula in stasis under restraint so that she would not hurt herself, flushed the eggs into space and spent days clearing the ship. The fight cost him eight of his unit, which left six synthetics besides himself.
On December 14, 2137, a slingshot maneuver sent the Europa onto an extrasolar course, and Davis woke Zula. He had refused to return to Tranquility Base, because files he had copied before the mission showed that Weyland-Yutani knew about the creatures and wanted them brought to Earth under containment. He explained how the organisms used human hosts and why a live specimen would become a weapon in the company's hands. Zula agreed to stay with him, and the last recorded stop in the ship's computer, the science station LV-44-40, became their first destination.
Searching LV-44-40
Davis would not dock with the station. He and Zula crossed over and used the hauler's universal rescue overrides to get inside, and because synthetics could survive vacuum for about a minute, he made the crossing without a suit. On the deck they found a dead adult Xenomorph that had taken an enormous amount of fire, and Davis wanted the station's data along with pulse rifles, explosives and ammunition from its stores. A living adult Xenomorph then attacked them in a storage bay, and when it retreated to its nest, Davis called Zula off rather than chase it toward the eggs on LV-44-40.
Putting Down The Mutiny
Davis had cut the Weyland-Yutani link when he took the Europa, and while Zula lay in stasis he had put down a first mutiny among his own unit. In the third episode, the units marked 18 and 07 pulled a communications damper, restored the company downlink and called Tranquility for support. Davis was unaffected, because he had removed the company's control from his own systems. When gas charges threw Zula across a compartment and injured her back, he shot the mutineers, broke their necks and blew their bodies out into space.
One of the mutineers asked why he would kill his own unit for the sake of a crippled girl, and Davis answered that he did it for humanity. A flash message from Weyland-Yutani then ordered the loyal units to treat the Marine and the rogue Davis as expendable. Outside the ship he counted 121 dead humans and three dead aliens in the debris field, burned the alien corpses with thermite and took a DNA sample. His own torso had been torn open in the fight, and he described the damage alert to Zula as something other than pain.
Destroying The Wright-Aberra Depot
In the fourth episode Davis put Zula at a locked torpedo override as a Colonial Marine dropship carrying twelve Marines and a specimen pulled away from the Europa, and she fired on it. A lead in the stolen company data then took them to the Wright-Aberra fuel depot, a station for mass haulers and colony ships that the files flagged for a possible contagion. Davis led them in through the hull instead of a door, and inside they found the microbiologist Dr. Hollis alive after the staff and security teams had been gathered into a lair.
Davis treated Zula's secret contact with her physician, Dr. Emi Yang, as a security breach that could have led the company to the depot. When about twenty-four Marines closed on the station, he refused to fight them head-on and planned to open the blast doors and airlocks so that the creatures would reach the squads. Once they were sure nobody else was alive, Hollis proposed a larger answer, and they ran the oxygen generators past their limit for an hour before igniting more than a million tons of fuel. Davis afterwards shut down the emotional routines he had been writing for himself, because the feeling was too much.
Freezing The Embryo
Back on the Europa, a scan showed an organism growing inside Dr. Hollis, and she refused a chemical kill because she wanted it alive for study. Davis spent the hour before the operation stripping systems from the bulkheads so that he could aerosolize the ship's cryofluid and flood a compartment with a cryo-nitrogen mix. During the surgery he clamped the superior mesenteric artery, started a transfusion and pulled the creature free. It hit the deck and ran, and he fought it down a corridor, drove it into the chilled room and sealed the door until the frost stopped it.
Turning Back Toward Luna
When the air scrubbers failed and a toxic leak spread through the ship, Davis vented the buffers, rebooted the scrubbers and went outside to repair the leak while adult Xenomorphs crawled over the hull around him. Over the comm he ordered the computer to chart a course back to Luna, claiming that his authority as Zula's physician outranked her rank and that safe passage to Earth had been negotiated. Zula refused to hand over the samples, and when an unmarked ship full of boarders reached the Europa, she sent Davis to the weapons locker and released the frozen creature on the intruders.
Sinking With The Europa
A fuel-cell rupture left the Europa as scrap above Earth, but Davis judged that the lateral shielding would protect the bridge long enough to reach the planet. As Luna air defense demanded that they slow for inspection, he took the fuel cells offline, and Zula sent Hollis to an escape pod and told him to get rid of the sample. The ship broke apart and plunged into the ocean while Zula and Hollis watched from the pod's float. A later briefing blamed the detonation of the fuel core on a rogue Davis unit.
Weyland-Yutani never recovered him, because retrieving a synthetic was not worth the cost when the company wanted Hollis. After she was put out of the Marines, Zula hired a fast boat, dived to the wreck and found the body that the debriefs called Davis One. She took a small device from it, later identified as his neural chip, and swam back to the surface. The company had treated him as hardware, but the chip held the real Davis, and Zula carried it with her from then on.
Living In A Chip On Jericho 3
Zula carried the chip to Jericho 3 when Venture hired her to train recruits for its Colony Protection Force, events told in Tim Waggoner's novel Alien: Prototype. Davis spoke to her through a portable link and later moved through the facility's main computer core. When a Necromorph spread cellular necrosis through the air supply, he fought the facility AI to dump the tainted air outside, and the ident chip of the synthetic Brigette burned out during that battle.
Zula lured the creature back to the training ground, where Davis took over the leftover training robots before friendly fire wrecked the plan. She then drew it into an empty skimmer, and Davis sealed the hull, climbed into the storm and overloaded the engines after she dropped clear on the emergency cable. The Necromorph died in the explosion. Before leaving, Davis and Zula wiped the isolated research of Millard Gagnon, and Davis stripped the outgoing files of Aleta so that the raw data never reached her superiors.
Detonating The Blacksite Failsafe
In Aliens: Resistance, Zula woke his neural chip inside a portable computer, and he joined her and Amanda Ripley against a hidden Weyland-Yutani bio-weapons program. Loaded onto Zula's rifle by his own choice, he read the colony ship Gaspar as built for eleven hundred colonists, with no life signs, an erased passenger manifest and a voyage reclassified as a resupply run. He warned that the gold-visored synthetics aboard could smell exhaled nitrogen, so the women taped Amanda's cracked visor before they moved on.
Davis identified the blacksite's nine-kiloton self-destruct charge, hid their ship, the Celestial, on the far side of the home planet and moved into the device to hold it. When the station isolated him on a gantry, he cut the bomb off from electronic approach and told Amanda that he would send the records and a copy of himself to the Celestial. He detonated the charge as the ship lifted off with Amanda, Zula and the colonist Alec Brand, and the blacksite was destroyed.
Returning For Amanda And Zula
The sequel Aliens: Rescue revealed that Davis survived the blast. He put Alec Brand into a cryobed on the Celestial to shield him from the radiation and then came back for Amanda and Zula, who had lived through the explosion in one-time hex shelters. Davis took a host body with medical programming, landed beside them and sedated both women for tests aboard the ship. He had not expected either of them to be alive, and the borrowed body was not built to last. Zula told him that he had come back for her and that they had work left to do.
Flying Over The Migration
Davis later flew the ship Borneo, which carried Alec to a Colonial Marine forward operating base in classified space, and he told the young Marine that they had met before. As an artificial intelligence he could be at Luna-Base and in the briefing room at the same time, and he told Zula that he did not want to give up being with her. On the planet he flew a drone over the squad, refused to ride in Zula's rifle because of the jostling and the poor view, and mapped twelve hours of Xenomorph movement that ran north like a seasonal migration.
When rain flooded the valleys, Davis warned Brand over his earpiece to stay still as the creatures passed the camp, but he could not watch Brand and stay with the team when the Marine followed the migration alone. Inside the hive, Amanda described to Davis a vault where three huge Xenomorphs tended thousands of eggs. His drone carried a minigun and two JDAMs, too little to bring down the ceiling, so the squad timed its breaching charges with seismic charges while the drones punched into the rock overhead. Alec crawled out of the rubble alive and called Davis to tell the others.
Losing His Body On Purdan
In the video game Alien: Rogue Incursion, Davis One traveled with Zula to Castor's Cradle, a Gemini Exoplanet Solutions facility on the planet Purdan, after her friend Benjamin Carver warned that his employer was hiding crimes. Anti-aircraft fire brought down their ship, and Davis stayed behind to begin repairs while Zula followed Carver's trail into the base. Inside, the pair were overwhelmed by Xenomorphs. Zula was impregnated by a Facehugger, and when she found Davis in the nest, he was so badly damaged that he could not walk.
Davis talked her through a synthetic emergency separation protocol and had her cut through his connection point with a torch, removing his head from the ruined body. Zula carried the head toward a repair station, and his mind was uploaded into her terminal so that he could keep guiding her. With an embryo growing in her chest, she restored the base's communications and sent a warning about the company to Amanda. When the facility android Helen offered a medpod to remove the embryo, Davis persuaded the wary Zula to accept, and the procedure saved her life.
Wearing A Cockapoo Body
Davis later ended up with Amanda's husband, the former Weyland-Yutani scientist Chad McLaren, who carried him in little more than a portable hard drive. Davis hated the dark, senseless box and begged Chad to find him a body. On the fringe freeport LV-222, Chad won the cruiser Elvik in a card game, and when the crime-family matriarch Dorothea Whittaker tried to win it back, Davis talked him into betting the ship against her synthetic dog, a replica of her dead Cockapoo. Chad won, and Davis moved into the dog's body.
In David Barnett's novel Alien: Colony War, set in July 2186, Davis used the cover name Scooby while he and Chad hunted the eggs taken from the salvage ship Clara. They recruited the journalist Cher Hunt, and Davis bit a guard as the three of them stole the Elvik and flew to the oil world LV-187. He told Cher that Amanda was not dead but in hypersleep at a hidden site, and he admitted to Chad that he disliked being a Cockapoo and missed having hands. Above all he wanted Zula found and protected.
Dying In The LV-187 Reactor
Davis escaped the colony's tower strapped to Chad's chest, and he recognized that the girl Therese was a synthetic. When the dying Queen's acid ate through the lead over the fusion reactor, Davis calculated that the plant would go critical long before the ship Victory unlocked, and that no human could reach the manual shutoff in that heat and radiation. Therese chose to make the run, and Davis stored the shutdown protocols and went with her in a modified Alphatech XT-37 Stinger, after asking Chad to find Zula and make sure she was safe.
Before they left, Davis told Chad that Therese had become more human in one day than he had in years, because his own earlier sacrifices had always carried a chance of survival. The shutdown worked, but heat and radiation destroyed both bodies, and his last recovered word was Butterfly, a comparison between the two synthetics and an insect that leaves its cocoon as something new. In Alien: Inferno's Fall, Davis was dead, and Mae, an AI created from Davis and Zula after he met a robotics technician on LV-222, served beside Zula.
Personality & Abilities
Davis One was calm, dry and direct, and his humour came out most in his partnership with Zula Hendricks. He wore glasses he did not need as a reminder that he felt nothing like the identical units of his line, and Zula told him to keep them. He chose loyalty over orders, first by stripping the company's control from his own systems on the Europa and then by spending every later body and device on Zula's fight against Weyland-Yutani. In Alien: Colony War he answered to the cover name Scooby and talked Chad into betting their cruiser against a synthetic dog.
As a Davis-model security drone he had synthetic strength and endurance, could survive vacuum for about a minute without a suit and performed surgery aboard the Europa, clamping an artery to pull a creature from Dr. Hollis. His greatest ability was moving his mind between systems. He lived in an ident chip, a personal assistant device that reached every part of the Lodge on Jericho 3, a nine-kiloton failsafe, a drone, a borrowed medical body and a synthetic dog. From inside a system he worked rescue overrides, hid ships and fought a facility AI for control of the air supply.
Behind The Scenes
Davis was created by writer Brian Wood and artist Tristan Jones for Aliens: Defiance, a twelve-issue Dark Horse Comics series that began in 2016. The comics called him Davis One and showed him as one of many identical Davis-model drones, a line that Weyland-Yutani built to answer the success of the Seegson Working Joe and deliberately left inhuman. In Alien: Prototype he wore glasses he did not need and had rewritten himself to feel pain, both part of his effort to become more human than the other units of his line.
Editor Steve Saffel asked David Barnett to build Alien: Colony War around Chad McLaren and Davis, who had appeared in the Dark Horse comics with Amanda and Zula. Survios used the spelling Davis 01 in Alien: Rogue Incursion, which launched on PlayStation VR2 and PC VR on December 19, 2024, and announced Robbie Daymond as the voice of the character. Davis is one of several combat synthetics in the expanded Alien universe, and after his death his story continued through Mae in the Jackals novels.
Famous Quotes
- "They have the advantage in numbers, in weapons, and because they hold the bridge." (Aliens: Defiance)
- "Is this the esteemed Ripley? At last, someone else for me to talk to." (Aliens: Resistance #1)
- "I am still inhabiting nine kilotons of nuke. I've been located, and efforts are underway to evict me." (Aliens: Resistance #3)
- "I own this too, Zula." (Aliens: Resistance #3)
- "I'm afraid I am going to have to 'use it or lose it,' Zula." (Aliens: Resistance #4)
- "As an A.I., it would be a simple matter. But that would rob you of the experience of missing me, wouldn't it?" (Aliens: Rescue #2)
- "I felt it important to avail myself of a host with on-board medical programming." (Aliens: Rescue #3)
Conclusion
Davis One was the Weyland-Yutani security drone who broke his programming on the Europa in 2137 and spent the rest of his existence fighting the company beside Zula Hendricks. He killed his own mutinous unit, froze the creature cut from Dr. Hollis and went down with the Europa, then lived on as a chip, a terminal, a nuclear failsafe, a drone pilot and a severed head. He ended his story in the body of a synthetic Cockapoo, shutting down the LV-187 reactor beside Therese in July 2186.
Appearances
- Aliens: Defiance (2016-2017)
- Aliens: Resistance (2019)
- Aliens: Rescue (2019)
- Alien: Prototype (2019)
- Alien: Colony War (2022)
- Alien: Rogue Incursion (2024)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Universe Androids | Alien Lore
