Gaff woke me up at 5 in the morning, pounding his damn cane on the door. Can't call, system compromised. Yeah I know, but it still pissed me off.
"Aw, I missed you Gaff."
Fuck off. Some guy named Chew is dead.
"Gee, that's too bad. Who the hell was Chew?"
Chew was a closet industry genius who sold bio-tech prototypes to outfits like Tyrell. Zaibatsu, like they say in Japan. A stringer, subcontractor, work-for hire. No dental plan.
Gaff handed me a scribbled address, Bryant's handwriting.
Another fun ride in Gaff's Spinner. Another crime scene in a lousy neighborhood. Chew’s place had a front office, a tough black guy at the front desk he’d hired for security.
The reps had smashed his skull in.
Inside the cryo-lab, Chew was a human popsicle. You could see the poor bastard behind the glass door, his hands pressed against the glass like a kid looking in at a candy store. A stark naked blue kid.
The reps had ripped off his protective suit. Got whatever it is they’d
wanted out of him, then shut him in and set the temperature to absolute
zero. Wiped the system memory of course. No faces on the security vids.
Just snow, like an old time TV.
Pathetic. And totally unnecessary.
They could’ve left him his shirt, his pants, his damn underwear.
Without that suit he was dead. Setting the dial to absolute zero, he was dead even with the suit
The forensics team got there first. Nothing to do but wait until Chew thawed out. I could hear them in the outer room talking in Japanese.
I thought these things had release mechanisms.
They broke it, idiot.
They also broke the vid monitors, see? So their conversation would be private.
So we wouldn’t know what they want.
So they wouldn't know. We don't want to know.
They looked at us.
"What the hell did they want?" I said it out loud to Gaff. He was, theoretically, my partner.
The forensics team looked away.
“What are you talking about?"
“The motive? What’s the point?”
Kisasi.
Cityspeak for revenge.
Gaff figured Batty wanted to hurt the man who’d designed them as slaves with a four-year expiration date. He'd programmed them to die. They wanted to return the compliment. But how? Tyrell was untouchable, sitting pretty on the top of his pyramid. Batty knew it, tried to penetrate the system anyway, twice. Mary got fried, Leon got noticed. Roy had sense enough to give up. He knew he couldn’t touch the big people, so he started picking off the little people, the zaibatsu, the vulnerable types like Chew.
"When did you figure this out?"
Right away!
The flash came in saying Chew was dead. Gaff figured this out in a microsecond. Told the boss in the next microsecond. Bryant said hell, maybe you're right. Warned the other subcontractors. Staked out their residences in case the replicants showed up.
I agreed with the action, not the reasoning.
"There's a flaw in your damn theory. You're assuming Tyrell gives a shit about his underlings. He's a cold-hearted bastard. You met him. Killing little people he doesn't care about is pisspoor revenge."
"Then why'd they kill Chew?"
"Why'd they break into the pyramid in the first place?"
"Tyrell. They wanted to get to Tyrell."
"That's why they killed Chew."
"Huh?"
"They're still trying to get to Tyrell."
Gaff called me some more unpleasant names. Used a metaphor describing the Tyrell pyramid involving a part of the female anatomy and alum. Breaking into that place was impossible. Everyone knows that, except for idiots like me who couldn't find their ass with both hands.
All this shouting made the forensics guys nervous. One of 'em pushed the wrong button. The door opened.
Chew pitched forward and shattered like an ice sculpture at a fancy dinner I wouldn't get invited to.
Back at HQ, Bryant debriefed us. Gaff helpfully pointed out that I hadn't touched the evidence from the hotel yet. Bryant busted my balls while he sat there looking smug.
No return flight. Without even asking me, they'd sent some flunky with a universal access card to pick up my car. So, I drove my way home, gliding through the 2nd street tunnel, enjoying all the pretty green tiles. Well, I didn’t drive. My car was fully self-drive, that still worked at least. Good thing, because the windshield wiper was broken and it was raining down like hell like always. Outside the tunnel, like driving through a carwash. But who wants to see what's out there anyway?
My faithful car knew where it was going and took me home. Neither rain nor snow, right? I got home. I went in the elevator, gave it my voice-print, and it recognized me.
"Deckard - Ninety-seven."
It took me up.
97th floor, the doors opened.
Rachel was waiting for me in the hallway.
I almost put a bullet in her brain.
She was shaking.
She was cute.
She followed me down the hall..
“I wanted to see you, so I waited."
That's great, Rachel. Now at least one replicant knew where I lived. Her Uncle must've given her my address. Or she took it. That's just great.
I smelled her perfume. Her fear.
I tried to put my card in the door. Fumbled.
"Let me help."
"What do I need help for?"
"I don't know why he told you what he did."
"Talk to him."
"He wouldn't see me."
Beep. I managed to get the card in.
The door opened.
I went in. Shut the door in her face. That was easy. Then I had second thoughts. Opened the door. Rachel was still standing there. She thought about it, then came in. My conapt was messy and shitty like always. Not expecting company. Not expecting her.
I’d have felt better if she was angry. But she looked scared and helpless. My inner Daddy wanted to put his arm around her. And that was making me nervous. She's not a she, Deck. She's an it.
“You want a drink? No?”
I wanted a drink. I poured one.
“You think I'm a replicant, don't you?”
I know you’re a replicant. But I didn’t say that.
Rachel knew she was a replicant. She didn’t want to know it. She wanted to think she was human. If I believed it, then maybe she’d believe it. So she had to convince me. That might work for awhile. Sure.
You can bullshit me. You can bullshit yourself.
But you can’t bullshit the VK test.
This thing was having an identity crisis. Ridiculous, huh?
And I sympathized with her.
Empathy. For a glorified wind-up doll.
She pulled out one of her fake photos from her happy childhood. Tyrell's niece, thanks for the memories.
“Look, it's me with my mother,"
Yeah. There she was. Little Rachel, sitting next to mom on a porch. They’d mapped her face ran the clock back and put her in the picture.
"A photo."
"Wow, yeah. Convincing."
"I'm six years old. See?"
"Photoshop. They’ve had it since the 80s."
She was crying. It was breaking my heart. Tell me I’m human. Just tell me. I knew she wanted to say that. You're human. I wanted to say that. But I’m a bastard.
I broke her heart instead.
“Do you remember when you were six?” I said.
Big eyes. Looking up at me.
“You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window - you were gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn, you chickened and ran. Remember that? Did you ever tell anybody that? Your mother? Tyrell? Anybody?"
Tears, maybe her first. I tried to think of those baby dolls that cried. But she looked like a real woman, which would make me a real bastard. That pissed me off. So I stuck the knife in deeper.
“You remember the spider that lived in a 'bush outside your window'? 'Orange body, green legs'? Watched her build a web all summer? Then one day, there's a big egg in it. The egg hatched..."
She completed the sentence for me.
“…and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her."
Looking at me. What big eyes you have. Wanted an explanation. Not the truth. An explanation where she wasn't a fake human being. That's what she wanted to hear. But it's not what I said.
"Implants. Those aren't your memories. They're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's."
Now she knew. Knew she was a replicant. Knew Tyrell had shown me the contents inside her skull. I’d won.
I’d destroyed her. I’d damned her. Hooray for me. Goddamn me.
All that water flowing out of her eyes.
I tried to take it back.
“OK, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You're not a replicant. Go home, OK? No really, I'm sorry. Go home.”
She stayed.
I wanted her to stay.
I got up to make her a drink.
Then she left. She left me alone.
I made myself another drink.
I picked up that photo. Rachel and mommy. It came alive for a second. One of the early 3-D captures. The porch shadows flickered. The little girl giggled. Then it went dead again.
Tyrell really did a job on Rachael. Right down to a snapshot of a mother she never had, a daughter she never was. Replicants weren't supposed to have feelings. Neither were blade runners. What the hell was happening to me?
I did a job on her too. I destroyed her. Went right to the heart. The cognitive-associative structure that held her together. Her memories. A lie, maybe. But real for her. The foundation of her personality. I just blew it apart.
Memories.
She was gone. Nothing left to do but work.
I started going through Leon’s pictures.
Leon's pictures had to be as phony as Rachael's. I didn't know why a replicant would collect photos. Maybe they were like Rachael. They needed memories.
Sure. Tyrell had made them that way. The need was built-in.
Rachel wasn’t the only experiment.
Some of the photos were fakes. Some were real, photos they’d taken of themselves. The answer was here somewhere, but I didn’t see it yet. But the machine would.
I fed one of the snapshots into my museum-piece ESPER. First generation quantum computing. In terms of industrial design, it had the elegance and simplicity of a brick shithouse. Black box. Big, ugly and clunky looking, but it still worked great. I turned it on. The 3-D monitor came to life.
It can take a flat photograph and infer the three-dimensional space from shadows and reflections. You can go inside the space and look around corners, way beyond the original depth of field. Obviously, the more you went out from what's actually in the picture, the more guesswork there was. But it's pretty good. Sony developed it to fill in the missing pieces of old movies. The police found other uses.
How’d it work?
Interpolative pattern recognition technology based on fuzzy logic heuristics. That’s the phrase I'd memorized, nerd talk for guess work. I don’t know how it worked, OK? Maybe there was a giant replicant brain inside.
The ESPER screen turned into a window into Leon's hotel room. The flat photo turned into a 3-D space. A cartesian grid overlapped it. X-Y-Z axis.
I told the machine where to go.
"Enhance 224176. Enhance, Stop. Move in, Stop.."
I navigated through the space. Verbal commands. Tedious. The newer models infer what you want to look at from your eye tracks.
I kept that up for awhile. Then I found something.
Clothes in a closet, a showgirl's glittery dress. Moved across the room, peeked around a corner, saw a sleeping woman, whiskey glass. Snake tattoo on her left cheek. Didn't match the incept vid records ... but the lettering in the glass was flopped. Through the looking glass and what the replicants found there. Photo of a mirror, tattoo on right cheek. It had to be Zhora. Blurry, but recognizable.
"Give me a hard copy right there."
The ESPER spat out a photo.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
1187 Hunterwasser
Desk clerk knew we were looking for a fugitive, assumed it was the human variety. LAPD knows, but knows to keep their mouths shut. Replicants go rogue, we keep it from the public. So, RepDetec put out the usual cover story. Officially, Leon's a disgruntled ex-worker, long-standing grievance with the Tyrell corporation, finally made good on his long string of psychotic threats. Armed and extremely dangerous. Three known co-conspirators, also considered armed and dangerous, blah-blah.
The damn elevator was broken. Better living through technology. Gaff and I humped it up the stairs. I got there first, heard him struggling with his cane. To hell with him. I left him behind and went in. Checked the bathroom first. You want to find shit, check the bathroom. Nada.
Just the faucet dripping. The heartless replicant had left the water running. Apparently, Leon didn’t care that fresh water was a precious natural resource. You can see why he deserved to die.
Went back in the living room. Crappy TV set from the 20th century with a picture tube. Gaff flashes me an ugly look in the doorway. Goes into the bathroom where he'd just seen me come out. Starts looking where I’d already looked.
I hate this petty shit, really hate it. Figuring to show me up, poking his nose in, find some evidence Deckard missed with his sloppy detective work. He’ll bring it to Bryant’s attention back at the station. After he pulls his nose out of Bryant’s ass.
Gaff came out of the bathroom. Now he tells me what I missed. But he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t been looking, he'd been making one of his origamis. I could see it in his hands, couldn't see what it was. Still working on it.
Do your job he tells me in that lingo of his.
Now he was really pissing me off. Our job was detective work, not folding up tinfoil. He should take his own damn advice.
I pulled open a drawer in the battered motel furniture, found some family photographs. Leon's fake family.
"Hey Leon! You looking for these?"
No answer, not surprising. Leon had dropped his real address at the VK session, knew RepDetec had the vid. He'd have to be as stupid as he looks to stay here, waiting nearly a day for the cops to arrive. No. The flat's been empty since yesterday morning. Leon's gone.
Unless he's hanging on the ceiling like a spider. One second, Gaff finishes his precious art project. The next, the thing drops down and rips out his throat. I looked up, couldn't help myself.
Nothing.
But the bathtub ...
Back in the bathroom. Turn on the light this time, flickering old fluorescent. I tapped it. The light brightened for a second, then died again. Bring a flashlight next time. And guess what?
I actually found something in the tub. Missed it the first time. Gaff missed it too. Something nasty, don’t know what. A transparent guitar pick? Lots of em? No. Not plastic. Organic.
Scales.
Whatever was in that bathtub was not human. Replicants don't have scales. And family photos? Replicants didn't have families either.
I put a few scales in a plastic evidence bag. Held it up so Gaff could see it. He didn't look up. Still screwing around with some chewing gum tinfoil.
"You should see this, Gaff."
He didn't look up. Busy hands.
"Hey!"
He looked up. Grunted.
"Know what this is? Take a guess."
Gaff muttered more gibberish. Guesswork is the mark of a lazy mind.
"It's called evidence. I found it. You didn't."
He grunted again. Went back to his stupid origami, then finished his art project.
A little man with his dick sticking out. The eternal hard-on.
You’re a dick, Deckard.
Subtle.
We trudged our way back to the Spinner. Figured we'd drop off the evidence back at RepDetec and Bryant would grill me for another three hours, then pay for a cab home where I'd left my piece of shit car.
Flying over LA again. Gaff having a private conversation with the voice in his headset. Not liking what he's hearing.
Out of nowhere, Gaff asked me a question. Plain English, this time.
"You got an ESPER?"
"What?"
"You got an ESPER?"
"Yeah."
Early-gen fuzzy logic tech. A box from 2011. Obsolete, I kept it in the closet. We patched into the RepDetec system now.
"It's a standalone?"
"Yeah -- Why's that important?"
We were passing the old Capitol Record building. RepDetec was ten miles north, by the Hollywood Hills. The flight path was wrong.
"Where --"
"I'm taking you home, stupid."
Again, totally wrong. Not SOP. Should've gone back to RepDetec HQ. Should've fed my report into the central AI, dropped the evidence off at the lab. Unless they'd broken through the RepDetec firewall.
"The system's compromised, right?"
"Probably."
"Jesus Christ, they hacked into ..."
"That ESPER of yours. It's a standalone?"
"Yeah. A 2011 model gathering dust."
"Good enough. Run the evidence yourself, OK? Like the old days."
"This is bad."
More cityspeak.
What an amazing observation. Thank God your brilliant mind is on the case.
"It's nice to be appreciated."
Fuck you.
"Speak English, OK?"
"Stop wasting time! Bryant says go home, work from home, stay home. No ..."
"No calls from the conapt, I get it."
"You don't get it! They've got your fucking address, stupid. Hacked into RepDetec, hacked into you."
"You, too."
"Just go home. Bryant's orders! First thing, unplug the phone, computer, TV. Sever all connections. You have make a call, VidPhons only. But try to stay inside. We got snipers around your place if they come for you."
"They're not coming for me."
Stay off the fucking balcony, OK?
"Sure."
Gaff dropped me off. I made it up the 97 floors to home sweet home. Followed orders, pulled the kill switch on the conapt network, pulled the plugs just to be sure. Did a sweep for surveillance devices for extra credit.
Then I walked out on the terrace. Walked right to the edge and looked down at the street, 97 floors down. Olive Street slicing through a canyon of highrises. Stood there, stayed there awhile, nobody shot me. Out of nowhere, Spinner whips around the corner, way over the legal speed, cop in another Spinner right on his ass, flashing lights bouncing off the buildings, siren going. Dopplered as he flew away.
A cop.
Somebody like me.
After somebody. I hope you get him.
Catch your prey. Sink your teeth right in.
I always root for the hunter.
Rachel
Went in with Gaff. They didn’t let us in, not right away. Security check, pain in the ass, took forever. Then some IT guy led Gaff to a secure
workstation to check the employee data base in case we missed one. They put me
on the secure elevator and sent me up to meet the big man.
Tyrell wasn't there. The test model wasn't there either. Penthouse suite the size of an airplane hanger, slanted windows looking out on the gleaming Tyrell complex. Nothing but vast empty space and expensive stuff, and I'm here all alone, except for the blinking white owl on a perch. I set up the VK rig on a long table. After that, I had nothing to do for maybe five minutes. I stood there like a clown. Then his niece came out. Rachel. I studied her, figured she was studying me.
Rachel was beautiful, cold. Self-contained body language, wearing a dress that cost more than the police Spinner on the roof. Black Irish features, a hint of Germanic cheekbones from her uncle's side of the family. Exuding class and disgust for sweaty cops who did the dirty work for the family business.
Rachel was beautiful, cold. Self-contained body language, wearing a dress that cost more than the police Spinner on the roof. Black Irish features, a hint of Germanic cheekbones from her uncle's side of the family. Exuding class and disgust for sweaty cops who did the dirty work for the family business.
She walked up to me. The kind of walk that takes hours of practice and coaching by trained professionals.
"Do you like our owl?" she said.
"It's artificial?"
"Of course."
Of course. Sure. The owls were all dead. If the damn thing was real, by law they'd have to surrender it to the wildlife dogooders who'd clone it, help reintroduce the species. Something told me it was real. They owned it and they were keeping it. To hell with the planet.
"Must be expensive."
"Very. I'm Rachel."
"Deckard."
"It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public."
"Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem."
"May I ask you a personal question?"
"Sure."
"Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"
"No."
"But in your position that is a risk?"
I shook my head no. I lied. Schizophrenics with low affect. Austism, Ausberger's Syndrome. Certain kinds of drug abusers. Of course it's a risk. We didn't make it public.
He had a way of walking and talking. Like he owned the world. He was one of the five guys who did. Did being successful make you an asshole, or did being an asshole make you successful?
He pointed to my gear. Happy and excited, for some damn reason.
"Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil? Involuntary dilation of the iris?"
"We call it Voight-Kampff for short."
Rachel remembered her manners.
"Mr. Deckard, Dr. Eldon Tyrell."
I nodded. He ignored me. Pointed to the VK rig again.
"Demonstrate it. I want to see it work."
"Where's the subject?"
"I want to see it work on a person. I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive."
"What's that going to prove?"
"Indulge me."
"On you?"
"Try her."
Rachel shrugged, bored. Fine, no problem.
"It's too bright in here."
Sky the color of spoiled milk, late afternoon sun still visible. Could affect dilation response.
Tyrell waved his hand. The windows polarized and the room got darker.
We sat down at opposite ends of the table, VK rig between us. SOP.
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"It won't affect the test."
Rachel lit up a cigarette like she'd practiced that too. I prepped my gear and studied her some more.
She reminded me of somebody. One of those actresses from the days when movies were flat and usually black and white. Veronica Lake, Lauren Bacall, somebody like that. A wreath of smoke surrounded her face like the clouds around our sick planet. Maybe that's why she reminded me of those dead actresses. They smoked a lot back then, just like now, but for different reasons. Today, doctors tell you to smoke. Back then it was bad for you.
"All right, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. Just relax and answer them as simply as you can."
She nodded and I started.
"It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet."
"I wouldn't accept it. Also, I'd report the person who gave it to me to the police."
"You've got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar."
"I'd take him to the doctor."
"You're watching television. Suddenly you realize there's a wasp crawling on your arm."
"I'd kill it."
"You're reading a magazine. You come across a full page nude photo of a girl."
"Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?"
No, the lesbian test comes later. I wanted to say that, but they don't pay me to be a smartass. I had a feeling she wasn't a lesbian.
"Just answer the questions, please -- You show it to your husband. He likes it so much he hangs it on your bedroom wall."
"I wouldn't let him."
"Why not?"
"I should be enough for him."
This went on for awhile. The results were confusing, at first. Then they weren't.
"One more question. You're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog."
She looked disgusted. Didn't answer.
Tyrell took charge.
"Would you step out for a few moments, Rachel? Thank you."
She left the room. A little rattled, but keeping it together.
Tyrell stood there grinning, cat that ate the canary, hungry for another canary.
"She's a replicant, isn't she?"
"I'm impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them?"
"I don't get it Tyrell."
"How many questions?"
"Twenty, thirty, cross-referenced."
"It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn't it?"
"She doesn't know?"
"She's beginning to suspect, I think."
"Suspect? How can it not know what it is?"
He gave me a patronizing look. Then gave me a sales pitch.
"Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. 'More human than human' is our motto. Rachel is an experiment, nothing more."
"What's the point?"
Asked the idiot child. He smiled indulgently. Answered the idiot question.
"Well ... we began to recognize in them a strange obsession. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better."
A lot of puffy words. Like styrofoam packing peanuts hiding a small, ugly truth. "If we gift them with a past." Like saying, "If we gift them darkies with chains." Slippery bastard. I put it more crudely.
"Memories. You're talking about memories."
Tyrell smiled.
"Yes, I am."
"Or it's a scam," I said. "Rachel's human. You've coached her or drugged her to blunt her affect responses."
"That would be unethical."
I laughed in his face.
"She's Nexus-6, I assure you, Mr. Deckard. In fact, I'll show you."
Tyrell took me into his private vid room. Nicer than the one at the station. Real executive class. Plush seats and all that crap. Made me sign a non-disclosure agreement, do the eyeprint thing.
Then he showed me.
Showed me the tank they grew her in.
Clips showing her gestation. 18 months, like any other replicant.
Showed me Rachel's inception.
Showed me how he read the memories out of his niece’s head. Without telling her.
How he wrote the memories to Rachel’s head.
Then edited them. Changed names, places. Wove them into the narrative of Rachel's life -- the fake legend that she thought was her past. Turned his niece’s memories into Rachel’s memories. Baby spiders eating their mother. Playing doctor with her little brother. He showed me all that. Things I didn’t want to see. Technology that’s not supposed to exist.
New kind of magnetic resonance tech, quantum level. Can measure fields in the microtesla range. Or target fields. Mind reading machine, basically.
Stuff that could pull any secret out of my mind, your mind, anybody's mind. Put stuff in and make you do anything, maybe. All of this was against the law. We still had laws, right? This tech could destroy government security, corporate security, personal security. I'm a cop and he's showing it to me. Theoretically, I should slam him against the wall, read him his rights and throw him in jail. The possibility never occurred to him. That's not the way the world works.
Why was he showing me this? To prove something? Rachel's inception log was proof enough.
He was crazy.
Tyrell had to make them better. Replicants were slaves, right? If you made them too human, they wouldn’t want to be slaves any more.
But he had to make them better. More human. More human than human. His corporate slogan, for chrissakes. Damn it, Tyrell wanted to beat the test. Wanted to gloat and say, you can't tell the difference. She's human, she's not human. You don't even know!
But these things couldn’t be human. That was the law. And it was just common sense.
If your replicant slave wakes up and says, "Wait a minute. I'm a slave. Being a slave sucks," chances are he's going to rebel. That's bad for business. They can't get too human.
They were born as full-formed adults and grew up fast. Tyrell tried to control them with conditioning that kept them docile and a cage of false memories. But they'd mature, think, feel, break out. Either turn psychotic or too human to use as slaves. His fail safe against that? A four-year death clock on the cellular level. The whole system was unstable and dangerous as hell. But that was his business model.
He started boasting again. Just wait till the Nexus Sevens came out. They'd get all the bugs out.
Sure.
This Owl-faced pencil neck geek was going to get us all killed.
I kept my mouth shut. One word from him could get me killed. Death squads. A guy like him, it was easy.
Tyrell asked for my address.
"I'm sorry. We're not allowed to give that out."
"That's all right."
The sonofabitch had it, of course.
He smiled. Light flashed off his big glasses.
No choice, pal
It went on like that. Six months. Until the night Gaff showed up at the sushi bar.
This time, he was really standing behind me.
He whacked me on the shoulder with his cane. Tried to bullshit my way out of it, but he marched me back to his aircar, back to work. Gaff didn't like it, but I took my dinner.
Hardly felt the lift-off. Brand new model 2020 Spinner flew like a dream. Immaculately clean. I ate what was left of my noodles in the car. And made a point of spilling some sauce on the seats.
We docked at RepDetec. I practically kicked Bryant's door in.
"You wouldn't have come if I'd just asked you to," he said. "Sit down pal."
I didn't sit down. Just stood there shaking with rage.
"C'mon don't be an asshole, Deckard. I've got four skin jobs walking the streets. They jumped a shuttle off world -- killed the crew and passengers. They found the shuttle drifting off the coast, so we know they're around."
"Embarrassing."
"No sir. Not embarrassing, 'cause no one's ever going to find out they're down here. 'Cause you're going to spot them, and you're going to air them out."
"I don't work here anymore. Give it to Holden, he's good."
Holden's pic was on the wall. Most kills for November 2019. A big gold star.
"I did. He can breathe okay as long as nobody unplugs him."
"Jesus."
"He's not good enough, not good as you. I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old Blade Runner, I need your magic."
"I was quit when I come in here, Bryant, I'm twice as quit now."
I'd made this speech before. Practiced it front of my mirror.
I turned around and walked out.
"Stop right where you are."
Something about the way he said it. I stopped.
"You know the score pal. If you're not cop, you're little people.
"No choice, huh?"
"No choice pal."
No choice. That always simplified the decision making process.
Braynt took me down to the vid room. Punched up the show-and-tell.
The shit went down few hours ago. 4:17 in the afternoon, though afternoon looks like night now with all the dust and rain in the air. Holden was over at the Tyrell Corporation, running the VK on this Leon Kowalski and trying like hell to keep his cool. Leon was fucking with him. He didn't look that advanced. He looked like a dumbass. But his questions were smart. Damn smart. Playing a mental chess game. Ten moves ahead of Holden.
Leon: I already had an IQ test this year, I don't think I've ever had one of these-
Holden: Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Answer as quickly as you can.
Leon: Yeah, sure.
Holden: 1-1-8-7 at Hunterwasser.
Leon: Yeah, that's the hotel.
Holden: What?
Leon: Where I live.
Holden: Nice place?
Leon: Yeah, sure I guess--
Bryant paused the vid. He gave me a look like he'd taken a sip of punch and found a turd in the punch bowl.
It didn't make the papes. Bad for biz. Bryant knew it, I knew it. Why say it?
"Five replicants, two male, three female. They slaughtered twenty-three people and jumped a shuttle. An aerial patrol spotted the ship off the coast. No crew, no sight of them. Three nights ago they tried to break into Tyrell Corporation. One of them got fried running through an electrical field. We lost the others. On the possibility they might try to infiltrate his employees, I had Holden go over and run Voight-Kampff tests on the new workers. Looks like he got himself one."
He started up the vid again.
Holden: So you look down you see a tortoise. It's crawling towards you.
Leon: Tortoise, what's that?
Holden: Know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I've never seen a turtle.
"Enough," I said. "Leon fucks with Holden some more, then shoots him. I don't need to see it."
Bryant killed the vid.
"Reaction?"
"I don't know ..."
"What don't you know?"
"Well ... I don't get it. What do they risk coming back to earth for? That's unusual. Why -- what do they want out of the Tyrell Corporation?"
"Well you tell me pal, that's what you're here for."
"How? I've got nothing to go on."
"Not yet. But I've got the incept logs."
"Holden didn't."
Bryant looked insulted for a microsecond. Then smiled.
Bryant whacked on the keypad with his stubby fingers. A face popped up. Male. Blonde and blue-eyed and perfect. Too damn perfect.
"What's this?"
"Nexus Six."
"New model?"
"New model, pal."
"You could've mentioned it."
"Hell, Deck. Just figured you knew it. You're the expert, right? Slipped my mind you've been out of the loop for six months. Stuff changes so fast these days, huh? Just a few short months, you sure do miss a lot."
Bryant killed the vid and let me take it in.
Nexus-6. More human than human ...
Not just a slogan anymore.
I'd heard rumors about these things just before I quit. The Nexus-6 generation. The Tyrell Corporation's new pride and joy. Not available to the colonists yet. Strictly military, tasked to high level exploration and combat teams. Launched less than a year ago. Cutting-edge but they didn't say how.
"Holden was administering the Voight-Kampff test when one nailed him."
"Batty?"
"No. Leon, dumbass."
"Leon's a Six? Sorry. Stupid question."
Ugly bastard. Leon didn't look advanced, but he had to be. A Five would never get the drop on Holden.
Bryant punched up Leon's file just to put salt in the wound. Nexus-6. Leon Kowalski.
"OK, OK. Go back to the first one."
He punched up the blue-eyed wonder again.
"Roy Batty. Incept date 2015. Combat model. Optimum self-sufficiency. Probably the leader."
Hitler youth type. A face you'd see on a Nazi poster about the joys of exercise.
He moved on to the next contestant.
"This is Zhora. She's trained for an off-world kick-murder squad. Talk about beauty and the beast, she's both."
I rolled my eyes, didn't ask him about that hard-boiled detective novel he always claimed to be writing. Bryant moved on.
Contestant number four. Face like a living doll
"The fourth skin job is Pris. A basic pleasure model. The standard item for military clubs in the outer colonies."
"A basic pleasure model. Yeah, that’s what they do. I’m no rookie, stop feeding me shit."
Bryant squirmed.
“The Nexus Six generation. Some are prettier, some just as damn ugly. What’s the upgrade? What’s the difference?”
"Bigger, stronger, faster, pal."
"Bullshit. It's more than that. They're smarter, right?"
"Hell, Deck. You could say that about your damn phone."
"So what's the upgrade? The uniquely human quality?"
I could see him thinking. The wheels turning. What do I tell him? What do I not tell him.
He sighed and spilled it.
"They were designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions. The designers reckoned that after a few years they might develop their own emotional responses."
"Emotional responses?"
"You know, hate, love, fear, anger, envy."
“Hate, love, fear, anger, envy. Oh, you mean feelings. Right.”
“Yeah. Feelings. Emotional responses. What’s the difference?”
Bryant had all the subtlety of a first time shoplifter who thought he could walk off with a six-pack in front of the owner because he wouldn’t believe his eyes.
More bullshit. Bullshit in plain sight. He'd been shoveling it all night.
I called him on it.
“Come on Bryant, Hell, the Fives had emotional responses. You know that. You’re taking sophisticated emotional responses. Theory of mind, right?"
He nodded his head.
“You’re talking empathy.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to say it out loud.
Neither did I.
Empathy was the thing we used to tell the difference between replicants and people. It was the basis of the Voight Kampf test. Empathy. It’s the thing that made us human. And OK to kill them. We had it and replicants didn’t it. If they had it, we were Nazis in flying cars.
Bryant tried to talk around it. Fed me some bullshit to the effect that empathy isn't a single trait, it's a function of developmental complexity based on the mind's ability to map itself and create a theory of mind for others. An emergent phenomenon ...
"That's what it says in the brochure, right?"
"Don’t worry about it, Deck. Empathy's not a problem. They don’t have time to develop it, asshole."
"Why not?"
"They built in a fail-safe device."
"Which is what?"
"Four-year life span."
"Great. OK, so we got this thing's last address ..."
"It can wait."
"What?"
"We locked it down. The evidence isn't going anywhere. You got someplace else to go."
"This is not how it works."
"Forget it, OK? Now, there's a Nexus-6 over at the Tyrell Corporation."
"Demo model?"
"Demo model. I want you to go put the machine on it."
"And if the machine doesn't work?
Bryant gave me a dirty look. If the machine didn't work we were screwed. Killing them would be morally wrong, obviously. But how the hell would we kill them? If the Nexus-6 was beyond our ability to detect, the human race was up shit creek.
"Do your job, pal."
This time, he was really standing behind me.
He whacked me on the shoulder with his cane. Tried to bullshit my way out of it, but he marched me back to his aircar, back to work. Gaff didn't like it, but I took my dinner.
Hardly felt the lift-off. Brand new model 2020 Spinner flew like a dream. Immaculately clean. I ate what was left of my noodles in the car. And made a point of spilling some sauce on the seats.
We docked at RepDetec. I practically kicked Bryant's door in.
"You wouldn't have come if I'd just asked you to," he said. "Sit down pal."
I didn't sit down. Just stood there shaking with rage.
"C'mon don't be an asshole, Deckard. I've got four skin jobs walking the streets. They jumped a shuttle off world -- killed the crew and passengers. They found the shuttle drifting off the coast, so we know they're around."
"Embarrassing."
"No sir. Not embarrassing, 'cause no one's ever going to find out they're down here. 'Cause you're going to spot them, and you're going to air them out."
"I don't work here anymore. Give it to Holden, he's good."
Holden's pic was on the wall. Most kills for November 2019. A big gold star.
"I did. He can breathe okay as long as nobody unplugs him."
"Jesus."
"He's not good enough, not good as you. I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old Blade Runner, I need your magic."
"I was quit when I come in here, Bryant, I'm twice as quit now."
I'd made this speech before. Practiced it front of my mirror.
I turned around and walked out.
"Stop right where you are."
Something about the way he said it. I stopped.
"You know the score pal. If you're not cop, you're little people.
"No choice, huh?"
"No choice pal."
No choice. That always simplified the decision making process.
Braynt took me down to the vid room. Punched up the show-and-tell.
The shit went down few hours ago. 4:17 in the afternoon, though afternoon looks like night now with all the dust and rain in the air. Holden was over at the Tyrell Corporation, running the VK on this Leon Kowalski and trying like hell to keep his cool. Leon was fucking with him. He didn't look that advanced. He looked like a dumbass. But his questions were smart. Damn smart. Playing a mental chess game. Ten moves ahead of Holden.
Leon: I already had an IQ test this year, I don't think I've ever had one of these-
Holden: Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Answer as quickly as you can.
Leon: Yeah, sure.
Holden: 1-1-8-7 at Hunterwasser.
Leon: Yeah, that's the hotel.
Holden: What?
Leon: Where I live.
Holden: Nice place?
Leon: Yeah, sure I guess--
Bryant paused the vid. He gave me a look like he'd taken a sip of punch and found a turd in the punch bowl.
"This Leon. Where'd he come from and why were you looking for him?"
"Like I said, there'd been an escape from the off-world colonies."
"Like I said, there'd been an escape from the off-world colonies."
It didn't make the papes. Bad for biz. Bryant knew it, I knew it. Why say it?
"Five replicants, two male, three female. They slaughtered twenty-three people and jumped a shuttle. An aerial patrol spotted the ship off the coast. No crew, no sight of them. Three nights ago they tried to break into Tyrell Corporation. One of them got fried running through an electrical field. We lost the others. On the possibility they might try to infiltrate his employees, I had Holden go over and run Voight-Kampff tests on the new workers. Looks like he got himself one."
He started up the vid again.
Holden: So you look down you see a tortoise. It's crawling towards you.
Leon: Tortoise, what's that?
Holden: Know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I've never seen a turtle.
"Enough," I said. "Leon fucks with Holden some more, then shoots him. I don't need to see it."
Bryant killed the vid.
"Reaction?"
"I don't know ..."
"What don't you know?"
"Well ... I don't get it. What do they risk coming back to earth for? That's unusual. Why -- what do they want out of the Tyrell Corporation?"
"Well you tell me pal, that's what you're here for."
"How? I've got nothing to go on."
"Not yet. But I've got the incept logs."
"Holden didn't."
Bryant looked insulted for a microsecond. Then smiled.
"No he didn't, Deck. The reps started out at a
military base, forward staging area off Prox. They’d laid it to waste, no
survivors, no data. Holden was stuck with general descriptions while military intelligence put the pieces together. When these
files finally came through, he was lying in a respirator. You wanna see the files or not?"
Bryant whacked on the keypad with his stubby fingers. A face popped up. Male. Blonde and blue-eyed and perfect. Too damn perfect.
"What's this?"
"Nexus Six."
"New model?"
"New model, pal."
"You could've mentioned it."
"Hell, Deck. Just figured you knew it. You're the expert, right? Slipped my mind you've been out of the loop for six months. Stuff changes so fast these days, huh? Just a few short months, you sure do miss a lot."
Bryant killed the vid and let me take it in.
Nexus-6. More human than human ...
Not just a slogan anymore.
I'd heard rumors about these things just before I quit. The Nexus-6 generation. The Tyrell Corporation's new pride and joy. Not available to the colonists yet. Strictly military, tasked to high level exploration and combat teams. Launched less than a year ago. Cutting-edge but they didn't say how.
"Holden was administering the Voight-Kampff test when one nailed him."
"Batty?"
"No. Leon, dumbass."
"Leon's a Six? Sorry. Stupid question."
Ugly bastard. Leon didn't look advanced, but he had to be. A Five would never get the drop on Holden.
Bryant punched up Leon's file just to put salt in the wound. Nexus-6. Leon Kowalski.
"OK, OK. Go back to the first one."
He punched up the blue-eyed wonder again.
"Roy Batty. Incept date 2015. Combat model. Optimum self-sufficiency. Probably the leader."
Hitler youth type. A face you'd see on a Nazi poster about the joys of exercise.
He moved on to the next contestant.
"This is Zhora. She's trained for an off-world kick-murder squad. Talk about beauty and the beast, she's both."
I rolled my eyes, didn't ask him about that hard-boiled detective novel he always claimed to be writing. Bryant moved on.
Contestant number four. Face like a living doll
"The fourth skin job is Pris. A basic pleasure model. The standard item for military clubs in the outer colonies."
"A basic pleasure model. Yeah, that’s what they do. I’m no rookie, stop feeding me shit."
Bryant squirmed.
“The Nexus Six generation. Some are prettier, some just as damn ugly. What’s the upgrade? What’s the difference?”
"Bigger, stronger, faster, pal."
"Bullshit. It's more than that. They're smarter, right?"
"Hell, Deck. You could say that about your damn phone."
"So what's the upgrade? The uniquely human quality?"
I could see him thinking. The wheels turning. What do I tell him? What do I not tell him.
He sighed and spilled it.
"They were designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions. The designers reckoned that after a few years they might develop their own emotional responses."
"Emotional responses?"
"You know, hate, love, fear, anger, envy."
“Hate, love, fear, anger, envy. Oh, you mean feelings. Right.”
“Yeah. Feelings. Emotional responses. What’s the difference?”
Bryant had all the subtlety of a first time shoplifter who thought he could walk off with a six-pack in front of the owner because he wouldn’t believe his eyes.
More bullshit. Bullshit in plain sight. He'd been shoveling it all night.
I called him on it.
“Come on Bryant, Hell, the Fives had emotional responses. You know that. You’re taking sophisticated emotional responses. Theory of mind, right?"
He nodded his head.
“You’re talking empathy.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to say it out loud.
Neither did I.
Empathy was the thing we used to tell the difference between replicants and people. It was the basis of the Voight Kampf test. Empathy. It’s the thing that made us human. And OK to kill them. We had it and replicants didn’t it. If they had it, we were Nazis in flying cars.
Bryant tried to talk around it. Fed me some bullshit to the effect that empathy isn't a single trait, it's a function of developmental complexity based on the mind's ability to map itself and create a theory of mind for others. An emergent phenomenon ...
"That's what it says in the brochure, right?"
"Don’t worry about it, Deck. Empathy's not a problem. They don’t have time to develop it, asshole."
"Why not?"
"They built in a fail-safe device."
"Which is what?"
"Four-year life span."
"Great. OK, so we got this thing's last address ..."
"It can wait."
"What?"
"We locked it down. The evidence isn't going anywhere. You got someplace else to go."
"This is not how it works."
"Forget it, OK? Now, there's a Nexus-6 over at the Tyrell Corporation."
"Demo model?"
"Demo model. I want you to go put the machine on it."
"And if the machine doesn't work?
Bryant gave me a dirty look. If the machine didn't work we were screwed. Killing them would be morally wrong, obviously. But how the hell would we kill them? If the Nexus-6 was beyond our ability to detect, the human race was up shit creek.
"Do your job, pal."
Friday, September 13, 2019
Prologue
The end is near.
That’s what it said on the chickenhead’s sign, anyway. The one dressed in sackcloth and ashes. He also had sandals and a ratty looking beard. I guess he figured if you’re going for the mad prophet look, go all the way. That's LA for you. Still crazy after all these years.
I was on foot, trying to get into the Off-World Induction Center down at Pico and Alvarado. Space, you know? "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies." I was going for it. The mad prophet got in my way. I could’ve pushed through him; he was built like a concentration camp victim.
“It …”
That’s all he could say. "It."
Typical chickenhead. Back in '99, the Russians experimented with broadcast energy. Tesla stuff. Suppressed technology. The experiment went bad. An industrial accident on a global scale. Yeah, it gave us FTL space travel, all that Star Trek shit. But it wasn't worth the price. Whatever it did to the earth’s magnetic field fucked a lot of things up. Cell phones didn't work anymore, birds forgot how to fly south for the winter. The effects made some people sick and some people stupid. This guy was both. I didn’t have the heart to push him out of the way so I let him talk.
“It’s the end,” he said. Spittle flying.
“The end of what?”
“It’s the end. The end of …”
I let him finish his sentence.
He couldn’t, so he started over.
“It’s the end of the w-world…”
“Yesterday’s news, friend.”
People on the sidewalk laughed.
“If you’d showed up with that sign 20 years ago, you might have been useful.”
A bigger laugh.
“Where were you in '99?"
“Huh?”
Everybody laughed.
A crowd had gathered around the poor guy, like iron filings around a magnet. I’d started a show, made people notice him, made him the center of attention. He was cornered like an animal, in a circle of people, all laughing at him, he didn’t know why.
It gave me a chance to go around him.
I made it inside the center. It saw my face and the doors let me in.
The place was clean. Dry. Orderly. Not the Ellis Island image they try to sell you. No scruffy refugees, hardy pioneers. People in line, but not shoving and pushing, not confused, never desperate. Nice clothes, fit bodies, gleaming smiles. These people had their act together, an instinct for finding the right row, asking the right questions. By Darwinian selection, they were the winners of this planet. First prize: they got to leave. The losers never got in.
The pretty girl at the front desk smiled at me. Floating screens all around her, the chickenhead in one of them. State-of-the-art. Not like the crap we still have to work with back at the station.
"How can I help you? Do you wish to go off-world?"
"That’s right."
"Orientation or emigration?"
"I'm ready to go. Now."
"OK. Let's make sure you're you."
She already had my face recognition. I handed her my ID card to confirm. She did an eye scan to double confirm. Then saw something on the screen she didn't like.
"You’re a cop."
"Was. Ex-cop, as of today. I resigned."
She saw something else. She liked it even less.
"Rep-Detec ... Jesus."
Badass reputation. "Blade Runners," they called us. Running the razor's edge and all that shit. But officially RepDetec.
"Why'd you quit?"
"Why'd I start?"
I could tell her I went into the police force to help people. Two years later, I got a transfer. They put me in RepDetec. I had a new job description. Killing people. Except they weren’t people. They were replicants. And I wasn’t killing them. I was retiring them.
The trick was not to get angry at them. They were broken machines. They could hurt people. You turned them off.
RepDetec started out as an intellectual property crime unit. Before my time, but it strikes me as funny, in a gallows humor kind of way.
See, they built the first android generations on earth. Synthetics, nano-carbon neural structure. Japan led the way. Sexbots, what else? Multinationals run by guys like Tyrell built the bots. Their cheap competitors tried to reverse-engineer the tech. Just another kind of software piracy, but the knockoffs had product defects. Some of the cheap sexbots went apeshit. Ripped a few salarymen to pieces. The UN punished everybody. They made all self-aware andys illegal on earth -- outside of a few research facilities. It looked like a dying industry.
But Tyrell came back from the dead. Kept research and development on earth, but moved his autofacs to Mars. Expensive operation for a business with no more customers. Most people thought he was nuts. They didn't see what he was up to.
Loser regs off-world. UN's not looking over your shoulder out there.
Tyrell started using bio-tech. Not synthetics anymore. Not andys. Strictly speaking, these were clones -- genetically engineered from human, animal and artificial DNA. But "clones" sounds too damn human, so he called them "replicants." And rebranded his product as a perk for colonists in space, put most of his competitors out of business or absorbed them.
So, after driving his business off the planet, the UN bought what he was selling. Then the replicants started coming back to earth. Some damn homing instinct kicking in from a strand of DNA they couldn't identify. That's when our unit went into the killing business. And hired me.
The Nexus 4s looked like department store mannequins. Easy to find, easy to retire. The Fives were different. They’d been "programmed" to simulate human emotions, including the emotion of empathy. Those were the words they used in the marketing copy, anyway. Programmed. Simulated. According to the Tyrell corporation. Like a clever autistic savant who knew they were supposed to laugh at jokes and make a sad face when they hear bad news, but didn’t feel anything inside.
Then I had to kill a five-year-old girl.
She was crying.
Please don’t kill me. I’m not a robot. I’m a little girl.
She didn’t feel like a simulation.
I shot the kid in the face. I didn't feel it that much at first. After a day or two, the PTSD kicked in. Mental images, repeating. I knew how stupid that was, feeling sorry about that kid. Anthropomorphic horseshit, like feeling bad about shooting a doll. But it bothered me. I stayed on the force, went through the motions, resigned in my head a thousand times, and didn't mention the PTSD thing to the doc. They’ve got pills for that nowadays, but they made me feel dead inside. That’s how they work. Yesterday, my wife finally left me. Today, I resigned.
"Do you want my life story or the short version?"
"Short version, please."
"I did my job so well I put myself out of a job. No good deed, right?"
She laughed.
"OK, now here's an official question. What are your reasons for leaving the earth?"
She had to ask. A formality.
“Well, it’s that guy with the sign,” I joked, and pointed at him in the security feed. “He says the world is coming to an end. I figured he must know something. I'd better get off."
She didn't laugh.
"You don't like it here?"
I gave her a look. She gave me a look back. Acting all serious -- and then she broke down. She couldn't keep it up. Don't you like it here? Who the hell likes it here? She laughed.
"I’m just kidding. Say 'I don't like it here.'"
"I don't like it here."
"Done. You're good to go."
We had a good laugh.
Then she stopped laughing. Saw something she really didn't like on her screen.
"No. This can't be right. That wasn't here before."
"What?"
"Your IDs invalid."
"What do you mean invalid?"
"You're Rick Deckard?"
"Last time I looked."
"Rick Deckard is dead."
“Obviously not.”
"That’s what it says."
She pulled back, like she was afraid of me. I smiled at her. That seemed to make it worse.
I tried to make a joke out of it.
"The guys at the station. Police humor, you know?”
Bryant.
She knew I was a cop, high-level unit who didn't have to worry about rights and shit. It was there on her screen. She also knew I was theoretically dead. Weird, right? Five minutes ago, the screen said I was alive. Even weirder.
She had two choices. Report me, or let me go.
Walking around with a fake ID was a felony. A dead guy’s ID was a capital offense. Either way that takes out about half the people in LA, so the law wasn’t strictly enforced if you made the right payoffs. But I looked like Deckard. For all she knew, I was a replicant. Or a deep-cover operative. My sudden resurrection backed that hypothesis.
And I’d said the magic word.
Police.
Maybe we're testing the system. Looking for holes, weak spots. Maybe her whole life hung on what she did now. We're testing her, and this is a test she'd better pass. The way she's shaking, I figure that's what's going through her mind. But she tried to act calm.
She handed me back my ID card. Just shaking a little bit.
‘Yeah. Police humor. Don't I know.”
She forced herself to smile.
I smiled back at her and got the hell out there.
Outside, the crowd was still laughing at the chickenhead. Persecuting him, just like the Christians in the old days. A martyr like this guy, that should’ve made him feel good. But it made me feel bad. At least I felt like I should’ve felt bad.
The rain was coming down on his head. Acid rain. He didn’t have sense to come out of it. Or cover himself.
I gave him my fedora.
I’d be bald in a year if I didn’t get a new hat or one of those stupid umbrellas.
But that was the least of my problems.
What just happened to me is what happens to little people when they piss off the big people. First they kill you in the system. Then they kill you in the flesh. The real death is just a formality.
Bryant had blanked my file.
He was sending me a message.
Trying to get out? It doesn't work that way, Deckard. You’re living on borrowed time, pal. When can kill you anytime we want. Come back to the station. We’ll straighten it all out.
I didn’t.
I went back to my favorite noodle bar. The White Dragon. The sushi was tank-raised crap, but I liked the cool neon sign. I had some actual paper money left in my wallet. Enough to eat now. Figure the rest out later. Then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My personal early-warning system.
Someone standing behind me, looking over my shoulder like a teacher who thinks I'm cheating on a test. Bryant, probably. I knew he’d show up.
Or Gaff. Bryant’s new flunky. An ass kisser.
One or the other.
They're right behind me. They'll either bring me back. Or I’ll stop being anywhere.
Kill me. Or let me die, a corpse as far as the system was concerned, can't buy anything, can't eat. Die now, die later. It was only a matter of time. I whirled around.
"Fuck you, Bryant ..."
My brilliant response to this sick game. But he wasn't there to hear it. Gaff either.
Nobody there. My instincts lied, this time. Nerves maybe. Or they'd moved before I could look.
I went back to shoveling sushi. Another advertising blimp gliding overhead, searchlights shining, loud voice booming down making the same old pitch. I didn't even look up, but I could hear it.
A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free.
Free. Sure.
Free is always the most expensive.
I killed the sushi and went back home.
Figured my conapt would lock me out, I'd be out on the streets, starving, desperate, Bryant's way to bring me in. But the elevator accepted my voice command, the front door let me in, the electricity kept flowing, though I had no way to buy food. Dead guys don't eat, right?
After two days of this treatment, my identity magically reappeared. Bryant put my paycheck into my account every week -- just to remind me who was boss. No retirement bounties, but enough to live on. I could buy stuff at Ralph's and make calls on the VidPhons. But I couldn’t leave the earth. My identity had been flagged. Suspicious. Hold for questioning. Bryant had me on a leash. The lease was long and loose. I could hardly feel it. But I knew the leash was there. One of these days, the shit'd hit the fan and he'd yank me back it.
Or with any luck he wouldn't.
The situation was changing. Used to be replicants came back to earth and melted into the sea of humanity. They came by the hundreds of thousands, took good jobs away from decent hard-working human beings. The problem was big, it didn't go away, and that's why we stayed in business.
But face and bio-recognition kept getting better and better. Cams everywhere, seeing everything. These days, there's no place left to hide on this planet. So the smart reps changed their identities and found some new colony world -- rough and ready, pioneer days level. They disappeared into the wild frontier. Earth was the last place they want to go now, so the cases were drying up. Any day now, RepDetec will go the way of the House Committee on UnAmerican Actitivies. We'll close up shop. The checks will stop coming.
In the meantime, I kept going back to the White Dragon. Each day was like the last day, day was like night, it all blurred together like a scene in a movie they kept reshooting because they didn’t get it right.
The food didn’t get any better.
The advertising blimps kept repeating their messages.
I ate, and I waited.
For six months.
Then the shit hit the fan.
That’s what it said on the chickenhead’s sign, anyway. The one dressed in sackcloth and ashes. He also had sandals and a ratty looking beard. I guess he figured if you’re going for the mad prophet look, go all the way. That's LA for you. Still crazy after all these years.
I was on foot, trying to get into the Off-World Induction Center down at Pico and Alvarado. Space, you know? "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies." I was going for it. The mad prophet got in my way. I could’ve pushed through him; he was built like a concentration camp victim.
“It …”
That’s all he could say. "It."
Typical chickenhead. Back in '99, the Russians experimented with broadcast energy. Tesla stuff. Suppressed technology. The experiment went bad. An industrial accident on a global scale. Yeah, it gave us FTL space travel, all that Star Trek shit. But it wasn't worth the price. Whatever it did to the earth’s magnetic field fucked a lot of things up. Cell phones didn't work anymore, birds forgot how to fly south for the winter. The effects made some people sick and some people stupid. This guy was both. I didn’t have the heart to push him out of the way so I let him talk.
“It’s the end,” he said. Spittle flying.
“The end of what?”
“It’s the end. The end of …”
I let him finish his sentence.
He couldn’t, so he started over.
“It’s the end of the w-world…”
“Yesterday’s news, friend.”
People on the sidewalk laughed.
“If you’d showed up with that sign 20 years ago, you might have been useful.”
A bigger laugh.
“Where were you in '99?"
“Huh?”
Everybody laughed.
A crowd had gathered around the poor guy, like iron filings around a magnet. I’d started a show, made people notice him, made him the center of attention. He was cornered like an animal, in a circle of people, all laughing at him, he didn’t know why.
It gave me a chance to go around him.
I made it inside the center. It saw my face and the doors let me in.
The place was clean. Dry. Orderly. Not the Ellis Island image they try to sell you. No scruffy refugees, hardy pioneers. People in line, but not shoving and pushing, not confused, never desperate. Nice clothes, fit bodies, gleaming smiles. These people had their act together, an instinct for finding the right row, asking the right questions. By Darwinian selection, they were the winners of this planet. First prize: they got to leave. The losers never got in.
The pretty girl at the front desk smiled at me. Floating screens all around her, the chickenhead in one of them. State-of-the-art. Not like the crap we still have to work with back at the station.
"How can I help you? Do you wish to go off-world?"
"That’s right."
"Orientation or emigration?"
"I'm ready to go. Now."
"OK. Let's make sure you're you."
She already had my face recognition. I handed her my ID card to confirm. She did an eye scan to double confirm. Then saw something on the screen she didn't like.
"You’re a cop."
"Was. Ex-cop, as of today. I resigned."
She saw something else. She liked it even less.
"Rep-Detec ... Jesus."
Badass reputation. "Blade Runners," they called us. Running the razor's edge and all that shit. But officially RepDetec.
"Why'd you quit?"
"Why'd I start?"
I could tell her I went into the police force to help people. Two years later, I got a transfer. They put me in RepDetec. I had a new job description. Killing people. Except they weren’t people. They were replicants. And I wasn’t killing them. I was retiring them.
The trick was not to get angry at them. They were broken machines. They could hurt people. You turned them off.
RepDetec started out as an intellectual property crime unit. Before my time, but it strikes me as funny, in a gallows humor kind of way.
See, they built the first android generations on earth. Synthetics, nano-carbon neural structure. Japan led the way. Sexbots, what else? Multinationals run by guys like Tyrell built the bots. Their cheap competitors tried to reverse-engineer the tech. Just another kind of software piracy, but the knockoffs had product defects. Some of the cheap sexbots went apeshit. Ripped a few salarymen to pieces. The UN punished everybody. They made all self-aware andys illegal on earth -- outside of a few research facilities. It looked like a dying industry.
But Tyrell came back from the dead. Kept research and development on earth, but moved his autofacs to Mars. Expensive operation for a business with no more customers. Most people thought he was nuts. They didn't see what he was up to.
Loser regs off-world. UN's not looking over your shoulder out there.
Tyrell started using bio-tech. Not synthetics anymore. Not andys. Strictly speaking, these were clones -- genetically engineered from human, animal and artificial DNA. But "clones" sounds too damn human, so he called them "replicants." And rebranded his product as a perk for colonists in space, put most of his competitors out of business or absorbed them.
So, after driving his business off the planet, the UN bought what he was selling. Then the replicants started coming back to earth. Some damn homing instinct kicking in from a strand of DNA they couldn't identify. That's when our unit went into the killing business. And hired me.
The Nexus 4s looked like department store mannequins. Easy to find, easy to retire. The Fives were different. They’d been "programmed" to simulate human emotions, including the emotion of empathy. Those were the words they used in the marketing copy, anyway. Programmed. Simulated. According to the Tyrell corporation. Like a clever autistic savant who knew they were supposed to laugh at jokes and make a sad face when they hear bad news, but didn’t feel anything inside.
Then I had to kill a five-year-old girl.
She was crying.
Please don’t kill me. I’m not a robot. I’m a little girl.
She didn’t feel like a simulation.
I shot the kid in the face. I didn't feel it that much at first. After a day or two, the PTSD kicked in. Mental images, repeating. I knew how stupid that was, feeling sorry about that kid. Anthropomorphic horseshit, like feeling bad about shooting a doll. But it bothered me. I stayed on the force, went through the motions, resigned in my head a thousand times, and didn't mention the PTSD thing to the doc. They’ve got pills for that nowadays, but they made me feel dead inside. That’s how they work. Yesterday, my wife finally left me. Today, I resigned.
"Do you want my life story or the short version?"
"Short version, please."
"I did my job so well I put myself out of a job. No good deed, right?"
She laughed.
"OK, now here's an official question. What are your reasons for leaving the earth?"
She had to ask. A formality.
“Well, it’s that guy with the sign,” I joked, and pointed at him in the security feed. “He says the world is coming to an end. I figured he must know something. I'd better get off."
She didn't laugh.
"You don't like it here?"
I gave her a look. She gave me a look back. Acting all serious -- and then she broke down. She couldn't keep it up. Don't you like it here? Who the hell likes it here? She laughed.
"I’m just kidding. Say 'I don't like it here.'"
"I don't like it here."
"Done. You're good to go."
We had a good laugh.
Then she stopped laughing. Saw something she really didn't like on her screen.
"No. This can't be right. That wasn't here before."
"What?"
"Your IDs invalid."
"What do you mean invalid?"
"You're Rick Deckard?"
"Last time I looked."
"Rick Deckard is dead."
“Obviously not.”
"That’s what it says."
She pulled back, like she was afraid of me. I smiled at her. That seemed to make it worse.
I tried to make a joke out of it.
"The guys at the station. Police humor, you know?”
Bryant.
She knew I was a cop, high-level unit who didn't have to worry about rights and shit. It was there on her screen. She also knew I was theoretically dead. Weird, right? Five minutes ago, the screen said I was alive. Even weirder.
She had two choices. Report me, or let me go.
Walking around with a fake ID was a felony. A dead guy’s ID was a capital offense. Either way that takes out about half the people in LA, so the law wasn’t strictly enforced if you made the right payoffs. But I looked like Deckard. For all she knew, I was a replicant. Or a deep-cover operative. My sudden resurrection backed that hypothesis.
And I’d said the magic word.
Police.
Maybe we're testing the system. Looking for holes, weak spots. Maybe her whole life hung on what she did now. We're testing her, and this is a test she'd better pass. The way she's shaking, I figure that's what's going through her mind. But she tried to act calm.
She handed me back my ID card. Just shaking a little bit.
‘Yeah. Police humor. Don't I know.”
She forced herself to smile.
I smiled back at her and got the hell out there.
Outside, the crowd was still laughing at the chickenhead. Persecuting him, just like the Christians in the old days. A martyr like this guy, that should’ve made him feel good. But it made me feel bad. At least I felt like I should’ve felt bad.
The rain was coming down on his head. Acid rain. He didn’t have sense to come out of it. Or cover himself.
I gave him my fedora.
I’d be bald in a year if I didn’t get a new hat or one of those stupid umbrellas.
But that was the least of my problems.
What just happened to me is what happens to little people when they piss off the big people. First they kill you in the system. Then they kill you in the flesh. The real death is just a formality.
Bryant had blanked my file.
He was sending me a message.
Trying to get out? It doesn't work that way, Deckard. You’re living on borrowed time, pal. When can kill you anytime we want. Come back to the station. We’ll straighten it all out.
I didn’t.
I went back to my favorite noodle bar. The White Dragon. The sushi was tank-raised crap, but I liked the cool neon sign. I had some actual paper money left in my wallet. Enough to eat now. Figure the rest out later. Then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My personal early-warning system.
Someone standing behind me, looking over my shoulder like a teacher who thinks I'm cheating on a test. Bryant, probably. I knew he’d show up.
Or Gaff. Bryant’s new flunky. An ass kisser.
One or the other.
They're right behind me. They'll either bring me back. Or I’ll stop being anywhere.
Kill me. Or let me die, a corpse as far as the system was concerned, can't buy anything, can't eat. Die now, die later. It was only a matter of time. I whirled around.
"Fuck you, Bryant ..."
My brilliant response to this sick game. But he wasn't there to hear it. Gaff either.
Nobody there. My instincts lied, this time. Nerves maybe. Or they'd moved before I could look.
I went back to shoveling sushi. Another advertising blimp gliding overhead, searchlights shining, loud voice booming down making the same old pitch. I didn't even look up, but I could hear it.
A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free.
Free. Sure.
Free is always the most expensive.
I killed the sushi and went back home.
Figured my conapt would lock me out, I'd be out on the streets, starving, desperate, Bryant's way to bring me in. But the elevator accepted my voice command, the front door let me in, the electricity kept flowing, though I had no way to buy food. Dead guys don't eat, right?
After two days of this treatment, my identity magically reappeared. Bryant put my paycheck into my account every week -- just to remind me who was boss. No retirement bounties, but enough to live on. I could buy stuff at Ralph's and make calls on the VidPhons. But I couldn’t leave the earth. My identity had been flagged. Suspicious. Hold for questioning. Bryant had me on a leash. The lease was long and loose. I could hardly feel it. But I knew the leash was there. One of these days, the shit'd hit the fan and he'd yank me back it.
Or with any luck he wouldn't.
The situation was changing. Used to be replicants came back to earth and melted into the sea of humanity. They came by the hundreds of thousands, took good jobs away from decent hard-working human beings. The problem was big, it didn't go away, and that's why we stayed in business.
But face and bio-recognition kept getting better and better. Cams everywhere, seeing everything. These days, there's no place left to hide on this planet. So the smart reps changed their identities and found some new colony world -- rough and ready, pioneer days level. They disappeared into the wild frontier. Earth was the last place they want to go now, so the cases were drying up. Any day now, RepDetec will go the way of the House Committee on UnAmerican Actitivies. We'll close up shop. The checks will stop coming.
In the meantime, I kept going back to the White Dragon. Each day was like the last day, day was like night, it all blurred together like a scene in a movie they kept reshooting because they didn’t get it right.
The food didn’t get any better.
The advertising blimps kept repeating their messages.
I ate, and I waited.
For six months.
Then the shit hit the fan.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Introduction -- Notes on Story
The following is a first-person adaptation of Blade Runner from Deckard's point of view.
The film's Raymond Chandlereque narration that Scott later excised implies that it was taken from a larger detective novel. My goal here is to recreate the complete narrative, like a paleontologist reconstructing a complete skeleton from a few bone fragments. This is obviously not entirely original. I tried to stick to the original movie as much as possible and include as much of the first-person voiceover as possible -- then fill in the gaps. (Some lines of voiceover are glaringly bad and totally illogical. I left those out.) I added a few elements from Dick's original book and a shout-out to Harlan Ellison. A few lines of description are lifted from Hampton Fancher's brilliant early draft, but most of it is out of my own brain.
I also tried to fill up a few logic holes and glaring contradictions within the movie universe.
Harrison Ford complained that his character was a detective who didn’t detect. He has a point. I've tried to recast the material as a detective novel, give him more of a job, and make him think more like a detective. It seems to me a detective's first question would be, “What do these replicants want? What's their motive?" After that, s/he'd come up with a theory.
In the movie, Deckard asks the question. Bryant says, "That's your job, pal. You tell me." After that, they just forget about it.
Horsecrap.
In the movie, Deckard asks the question. Bryant says, "That's your job, pal. You tell me." After that, they just forget about it.
Horsecrap.
Obviously this forces me to expand the original material. (Explain what was only implied.) Either that -- or change some elements so they make more sense.
So here's the first fix-up --
I have Gaff and Deckard come up with various theories on what the replicants want.
To revue the evidence --
The first thing the replicants do is to try to break into the Tyrell Corporation. One replicant dies in the attempt – fried by an electrical field. Leon makes a second attempt – then flees after he shoots Holden in the VK session. So, we don't know what they want yet, but we know they're trying to break into the Tyrell pyramid to get it. It's logical to think Leon and/or his pals would make another try. If you were a detective, this would occur to you, unless you had suffered brain damage. Nobody figures this out in the original movie.
So what do they want with the Tyrell Corporation?
So here's the first fix-up --
I have Gaff and Deckard come up with various theories on what the replicants want.
To revue the evidence --
The first thing the replicants do is to try to break into the Tyrell Corporation. One replicant dies in the attempt – fried by an electrical field. Leon makes a second attempt – then flees after he shoots Holden in the VK session. So, we don't know what they want yet, but we know they're trying to break into the Tyrell pyramid to get it. It's logical to think Leon and/or his pals would make another try. If you were a detective, this would occur to you, unless you had suffered brain damage. Nobody figures this out in the original movie.
So what do they want with the Tyrell Corporation?
Gaff’s theory is that they want revenge against their creator. Since they can’t get to the big guy, he figures they’re picking off the small-fry who work for him. (In Fancher's original script, Deckard finds Chew's frozen body. I put that back.) Gaff assumes they’ve given up on breaking into the Tyrell pyramid and reaching the big guy himself. After the first two failed attempts, the pyramid is on high security alert. Another breach is impossible. It’s not even worth thinking about.
Deckard’s theory is that they’re still trying to get access to Tyrell – not for revenge but for reasons he can’t fathom. (Later on, he figures out they want life.) Gaff dismisses this notion. But think about it ...
If they’re going after Chew – a subcontractor for Tyrell – it’s logical to assume they’re after information that would allow them to get in. (I add the element that Chew isn't the only subcontractor they've killed.)
If Gaff’s revenge theory is true, it follows the replicants wouldn’t just go after the subcontractors. They’d go after the Blade Runners – the equivalent of slave catchers, from a replicant's perspective.
Since the replicants breached the main LAPD computer, it’s possible they breached the RepDetec computer too – and know exactly where to find the Blade Runners. Based on this possibility, Bryant hasn’t restored Deckard’s file. According to the Repdetec system, he’s still dead. Even if the replicants breach the RepDetec firewall, they won’t realize Deckard is looking for them. At the same time, this means he’s working without any backup. He just doesn’t know it.
That’s the reason Bryant pulled Deckard out of retirement in the first place.
If you've followed me so far, here's another logical assumption:
It's logical to assume that a team of Blade Runner detectives would be thinking about this stuff and asking these questions.
If you've followed me so far, here's another logical assumption:
It's logical to assume that a team of Blade Runner detectives would be thinking about this stuff and asking these questions.
As noted, once I looked at the internal logic of the script -- I couldn't simply adapt the material from a detective's perspective. I was forced to patch up some of the logic holes.
There are things about Blade Runner that flat-out don’t make sense. Like this line of dialogue --
“Why would they come back to earth? That’s unusual.”
OK. There’s a whole "Blade Runner" police unit designed to track down fugitive replicants who've returned to earth from space. Even though that's unusual. I explain that away. Surveillance is better. They can't lose themselves in the sea of humanity anymore.
The elevator to Tyrell's penthouse has no !@##$ security camera. I explain that away, too. It's a back door for black projects which guys like Sebastian are cooking up for him. He wants no records.
The elevator to Tyrell's penthouse has no !@##$ security camera. I explain that away, too. It's a back door for black projects which guys like Sebastian are cooking up for him. He wants no records.
In his initial briefing to Deckard, Bryant makes a point of explaining the replicant's capabilities and limitations. (Like the four-year life span.) Deckard should know this already. It’s like telling Elliot Ness what a !@#$ Tommy gun is or Sonny Crockett that cocaine is this white powder people stuff up their nose. The scene only makes sense if the Nexus-6 line is a new model – and the ones that came before that didn't have a four-year lifespan.
It’s a big point in the book that the Nexus-6 replicants were a new model. It was clear in the original draft of Hampton Fancher’s script. David People’s rewrite obscures the point. (I’m not faulting him. Rewrites are tough. You pull what seems like an unnecessary line – and the whole garment unravels.) I put the point back in.
In Dick’s book, the androids were heartless bastards, period. The movie, I think, implies that the replicants are too human. They develop empathy to the point of nearly beating the Voight-Kampf test. That's the reason for the four-year life span. I make this explicit. I add the assumption that the emerging humanity of the replicants is also illegal. They're supposed to be inhuman slaves, right? If they become human, they get human rights. Tyrell's whole off-world operation becomes a crime -- and the Blade Runners become murderers. That's what's really at stake.
Instead of taking the evidence back to the RepDetec forensic lab, Deckard does the lab work himself. He makes all his calls on public VidPhons. For much of the movie, he has no back-up. I explain that too. Deckard is off the books, officially dead. The replicants can't break into the Blade Runner computer and trace him.
Also: It seems to all happen in one night – which is improbable. I stretched it out to a night, a day and the following night.
The chronology also doesn’t make sense. Leon shoots Holden at the Tyrell corporation. Like an idiot, Leon drops his REAL address in the VK session. Chances are, he wouldn’t go back to his hotel. But the logical thing for the Blade Runner cops to do is to seal off the hotel room immediately – and be waiting just in case he (and his pals) come back. And Leon evidently DOES come back and get his “precious photos.” In the movie, Gaff and Bryant show up at the scene hours and hours after Leon shot Holden. Has he just been hanging around all that time -- knowing the cops would be coming?
It's also logical to assume Deckard and Gaff would go to Leon's last known address first -- and secure the evidence. Instead, Deckard and Gaff zip on over to the Tyrell corporation to check out a demo model of the Nexus 6 – who turns out to be Rachel.
It’s only hours and hours later that they make it to the hotel. I explain this away by positing there's a cover-up.
First, the action takes place in 2019. This is, obviously, only possible in an alternate history. I posit a timeline in which the Russians uncork suppressed technology and destroy the planetary ecosystem. (This is lifted from my own SF alternate history -- so don't !@# steal it.) The same technology makes it possible to colonize space. This explains why the tech of 2019 is more like 2119.
And there's also some small stuff. This movie was made in 1981. Some of its predictions were right on, some aren’t. Some tech we take for granted doesn’t appear in the movie. Smart phones. Video surveillance. Things like that.
The replicants walk around LA like they own the city. It seems to me there would be cameras on every street corner hooked up to computers with face-recognition tech. I explain this away by saying they’ve hacked into the main cop system and deleted the files. The Blade Runner unit can’t put out a second alert without revealing what a threat the new replicants are – which would probably lead the Tyrell corporation to murder them all in the interests of corporate security.
The replicants don't bother to use fake identities. The names they use are the names in the Blade Runner files. Fuck it. I just gave up at that point.
The replicants don't bother to use fake identities. The names they use are the names in the Blade Runner files. Fuck it. I just gave up at that point.
Nitpicky. This is, when all is said and done, an exercise.
Now, if you don't mind, I need to feed my electric sheep.
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