prod. His severed head is reactivated to provide the crew with the truth about the creature. Ash complies, revealing that the company installed him to ensure that the creature was brought back to them, with the crew's lives being "expendable". After informing them of all he knows about the creature, Ash tells the crew, "You have my sympathies", regarding their chances of survival. Ripley then unplugs him and Parker incinerates his head with a flamethrower. Ripley's experiences with Ash left her with a great hostility towards androids, seen with her reaction to Bishop in the sequel Aliens. Alien: Out of the Shadows Midway through the novel, following Ripley's escape from the Nostromo at the end of Alien, Ash's programming had secretly remained in control of the Narcissus, Ripley's escape pod. After keeping the shuttle drifting for thirty-seven years, he detected the distress call sent out by the Marion and rerouted the shuttle to intercept it, hoping to continue with his mission to acquire a Xenomorph specimen for Weyland-Yutani. Soon after arriving at the Marion, Ripley learned of Ash's survival and he eventually revealed himself to the group (the explanation for his voice having changed, which occurs only in the audioplay adaptation of the book, being the Seegson terminal he uploaded himself into). Throughout the incident aboard the Marion, and on planet LV-178 below, Ash continued to plot against the survivors. After learning that a crew member had been impregnated with a Chestburster, Ash planned to arrange the deaths of the rest of the crew, hoping that the crew member would then enter hypersleep aboard the Narcissus, allowing him to deliver her — and the embryo she carried — to Earth. However, the crew member committed suicide before Ash could put his scheme into motion. With his plans to recover a Xenomorph in ruins, Ash, apparently driven insane by the years he had spent drifting alone aboard the Narcissus, planned to continue his journey with Ripley, with whom he imagined he had developed an intimate connection. However, before the Narcissus departed the Marion, Ash was finally destroyed when Hoop wiped the AI's program from the shuttle's mainframe using a computer virus. As Ash died, he made one last mission log to Weyland-Yutani, musing to himself that as his messages hadn't been going through to Weyland-Yutani, he has written the equivalent of a diary. With Ash destroyed, Ripley drifted through space for