Cause: Termination of Colonel Shipp
Document Type: Transcript of Shipwide Broadcast
Date: 23 Years after the Original Movies
*Note to Administrator: What movies?
Transcription: “Attention all soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. This is your Colonel speaking. You are about to leave the UAS Endeavor; our home for so many months. Where we’ve eaten, slept, and worked together. Shoulder to shoulder forging ahead into the stars. Where we’ve been a family. I am the matriarch and I promise to keep you safe on this great crusade. We value your life above all else. You are about to approach the surface of LV-895. It is a foreign planet that we have little to no information on. Hold on everyone, I’m getting reports from our surface drones now.
What’s that Jenkins? Eight foot tall killers? What do you mean there’s thousands of them? With hives? Certain death to anyone? Even our Colonial Marines? ESPECIALLY our Colonial Marines? What does that mean for our bottom line? Devastated you say? We can’t let that happen.
Then why are we here? Super secret government experiments that will result in the birth of these “Xenomorphs” which can grow to fifteen feet tall? And spit acid? And can tackle grown men wearing body armor? Well, why don’t we just send the robots? It’s seriously cheaper to give the meat bags a life insurance than to fix the parts? Fine! We’ll just send some grunts. They don’t know any better. They’re just truckers with shotguns!
Zero percent chance of success? Face huggers? What are those? Stop, stop, stop. I don’t want to hear that. That’s so gross. Ewwwww.
Yuck, now I gotta get that out of my mind. What else? ZOMBIES? Literal zombies? What doesn’t this planet have? Rogue androids that want to kill anything? Could you imagine? Those are there too!
Okay, everyone calm down. We can get through this. We’ll just send down a ship, give them no support, let them scrounge for resources, and then hope for the best. What are they going to do about it? It’s not like they have a bunch of huge guns and explosives to mutiny. Besides, they couldn’t organize.
Hey, what’s that blinking red light? This thing has been on the whole time! Someone shut that o-”
Final Recommendation to the Board (dictation taken from Executive Secretary and Assistant Cameron): Terminate Colonel Shipp’s position. Strip her of her rank. Terminate the entire Endeavor. Do not let this get out. This would ruin us. Jane, what am I even saying? Those jerks in their mighty tower couldn’t put down their hedonism for one second to be bothered to read this. It doesn’t matter anyway, they’ll just do it again on a different planet. Wait, are you still typi-
Daniel Wartham is a current grad student and spends his free time watching movies and taking walks to Waffle House at 2am. He can be found on Twitter at @DanielWartham.