by K. W. Jeter
Iris regarded him with amusement. 'Maybe that's the answer that they found out. The best way to yank your chain.'
'Typical,' said Meyer. His disgust was genuine and unfeigned. 'It goes to show that replicants really do lack the empathic function; that's what distinguishes them from us humans. If they had any concern for others at all, they damn well would show up here and get themselves killed. Hard times for blade runners, otherwise. I mean — look at this place. You think I'd be cleaning this dump and setting up shop in it, if I had a choice? But it's a quarter of the budget allotment that my corner window office in the new police building went for, so I'm making the sacrifice. Cutting right down to the bone, Iris; to the bone.'
She'd been wondering why he'd told her to meet him here, in the old and otherwise abandoned facility, rather than the shiny new LAPD headquarters. Plus she knew he had a natural aversion to the place where a former division captain had bit it. That death smell wasn't only a matter of molecules drifting in the air, ready to be inhaled; it seeped out of the dingy, ill-lit corners and yellowing stacks of paper, right into one's soul.
Another of the scanitorial units crawled across the toe of Iris's boot, carrying an outdated departmental memo about ammunition expenditures to the incinerator-prepped pile beyond the door. All the time the humans in the room had been bitching and moaning, the swarm of small machines had been swiftly and efficiently going about their business; the stacks and tides of old paper had already been considerably diminished, like a dry, dead sea being drained away. That was, Iris supposed, what made them better than both humans and replicants. They don't, she thought, bitch about their lot in life.
'“Go to the ant, thou sluggard.”' She spoke her next thoughts aloud. '“Consider her ways.”'
'What?' Meyer had pulled one of the desk drawers all the way out and had been dumping its contents into an empty cardboard box. He looked up at her in puzzlement.
'Nothing.' She didn't know what she had been quoting from, either. The disconnected scrap of memory faded away. 'Look,' said Iris, 'I don't care about the quantity or quality of the jobs out on the street. You want me to kick ass, I'll kick ass. That's what I do. Just give me what you got.'
'All right.' Meyer slid the empty drawer back into the desk. 'But you might think it's a bit out of your line.' He rummaged in his jacket's inside pocket and drew out a couple of folded sheets of paper. 'Here you go.'
'What the hell's this?' The top sheet wasn't the usual rep-hunting data. The only name given was 'Scrappy'; there were no bio details, no list of identifying physical characteristics. And the height given — 64 centimeters — was absurd. She'd blown away some small-statured replicants in her time, usually female ones, but nothing so tiny as to be in the two-foot-tall range. That would have to be a child, an infant — and there were no baby replicants, she knew. Replicants couldn't reproduce.
'Look at the photo.'
She flipped to the next sheet. The picture was in grainy black and white, but clear enough for her to make out what it was.
'This is a joke, right?' Iris lowered the sheets of paper in her hand and glared at Meyer. 'Real funny.'
'No joke, sweetheart. That's the job.'
Iris looked again at the second sheet. The photo of a bird — an owl, with large circular eyes — looked back at her.
'I hunt replicants.' Iris angrily tossed the sheets of paper onto the desk. 'You want a bird, go down to the souk. They got plenty of artificial ones there.'
'This isn't a fake bird,' said Meyer. 'It's a real owl.'
'Sure it is. A real, living owl? In LA? Try it on somebody else. The only real birds left in this town are those ratty pigeons you find at the tops of the buildings.'
'Nevertheless.' Meyer reached into his jacket again and pulled out an unlabeled data-tab. Holding the small square between his thumb and forefinger, he deposited it in the palm of Iris's hand. 'Here's some more info on it. Enough to get you started, at least.'
She felt like flinging the small black square back into his face. 'I don't do birds.'
'Oh?' Meyer raised an eyebrow. 'Even when there's a bounty on one?'
That stopped her. 'How much?'
Her heart ticked a little faster when he told her. The bounty was even more than the double whack for which the Enesque replicant had gone. Way more. 'How come so much?'
'That's not your concern,' said Meyer. 'Not mine, either.' With the back of his hand, he knocked aside a scanitor that had climbed onto the desk, aiming for the two folded pieces of paper. 'The only question is — you want the job?'
'I don't know . . .' A rare feeling of self-doubt walked around inside her gut. 'It's not really the kind of thing I do ..
'Let me put it this way.' Meyer's voice turned colder than she had ever heard it before. 'The alternative is turning down the assignment, at a time when there aren't a lot of assignments going around. I bumped you ahead of some others on the list, to give you that Enesque job. I'm doing the same on this one with the owl.' He shook his head. 'You turn it down, and I won't be able to guarantee you that I can get you another job, not for a while, at least. And sitting on your hands, doing nothing, is not where you want to be when the departmental reorganization comes down. I'll have a hard enough time keeping my own neck off the chopping block. I'm not going to stick it out there for yours.'
Iris nodded slowly; she'd never had any illusions about the nature of the relationship between the two of them. 'That's the way it is, huh?'
'You got it, sweetheart.'
She closed her fist around the black square. 'I'll take it.'
3
The neon had gotten into her apartment again.
'Shit.' With hands planted on her hips, ring of door-lock swipe cards dangling from one crooked finger, Iris looked around in disgust at the colors brightly threading through the dark living room. The stuff was like kudzu, the creeper vines that she'd once read about; maybe in some place far from Los Angeles, real kudzu still existed, greenly extending its leafy, serpentine tendrils across the otherwise empty landscape. That crawling neon was what one got in LA only confirmed the city as some fallen and degraded sphere of existence.
Iris closed the door behind her — a vertical row of LEDs flashed from green to amber to red, as the locks shot home in sequence — and fumbled for the lights. She had to dig her fingers under a parallel set of flickering glass tubes and snap them loose from the wall, before she could reach the switch. The overhead glow from the expensive full-spectrum fluorescents came on dimmed and filtered violet and blue; Iris looked up and saw that the fixture in the center of the water-stained ceiling had also been engulfed by the neon tubing, like a bird's nest besieged by luminous snakes.
She threw the ring of cards onto the utility table she had left folded out from the efficiency apartment's wall; the neon hadn't yet completely taken over that horizontal space. The stuff grew fast; she could see the tips of the softly glowing tendrils assembling and extending themselves farther, a darker string of liquefied silica along each tube supplying the raw materials, and a translucent surface-effect sheath providing the power to light up the gas pumped inside. A probing lead tendril must have been prying away at the exterior of the apartment building, searching for some hairline chink between the gray cement blocks that it could wriggle through. One time before, when the neon had gotten in, Iris had traced the main stem, big around as her forearm by then, back to the bathroom toilet, where it had come up, urban-legendlike, from the underground sewers. That had happened while she was asleep; she had woken to find herself in the middle of a bad dream of advertising, her walls pulsing in the night with pinyin ideograms and the flesh-colored outlines of stylized strip-club dancers, blinking red dots for nipples.
None of the stuff on the apartment's living room walls looked as bad as that had been; this time, most of the neon ads appeared to be in Anglo-Cyrillic, with obscurely labeled bottles outlined in the brightest reds. She wasn't curious enough to puzzle out a translation of what was being hawked; as far a
s she could tell, most of the products might not even exist. The neon was programmed to generate words and brand names and even skin emporia addresses, all from randomizing syllabic algorithms; the way LA was ceaselessly reinventing itself, the chances were good that at least some of the advertisements would turn out prophetic.
I'll clean up this mess later. Iris didn't have time to screw around with it now. She'd need safety goggles to deal with the broken glass tubing, and a mask and portable oxygen supply to keep from being suffocated by the vapors that would be released. That was way too much trouble, even when the pressure wasn't on her.
The neon hadn't swallowed up her genuine-vintage, naugahyde La-Z-Boy® recliner; the crawling tubes preferred covering the hard surfaces in a locale before taking on anything as soft and cushy as that. As Iris lowered herself into the armchair's enveloping depth, letting it elevate her aching feet, something warm and rubbery climbed into her lap.
'It's been hell around here,' announced her pet chat. Its complaint was voiced in a relentlessly perky voice. 'Lookit this place.'
'I'm not blind.' Iris automatically stroked the chat's bare head. 'I can see it.'
'What're you going to do about it? Huh?' The chat's voice shifted into wheedling-nag mode, a barely perceptible underlay of sawtooth waveforms filtering its words. 'How'm I supposed to sleep with everything lit up like the MacArthur Park towers?'
'Shush.' Iris's fingertips had started to go tingly-numb, as the chat's endorphic, fugu-derived neurotoxins started to seep beneath the skin. A metal taste, like licking the top of a flashlight battery, slid beneath her tongue; the world outside the apartment's multi-locked door already seemed less dark and forbidding. 'I'll take care of it. But Mom's got work to do right now.'
The chat perched on the arm of the recliner and watched as she fished out of her jacket the datad Meyer had given her. Wuzzat?'
'Stuff about a job.' Iris placed the tiny black square into the chat's paws and pushed it toward the surresper machine's intake mouth. 'So Mom can pay your cable bills; all those weep-'n'-fight springerthons cost money, honey. Go on; be a pal.'
'For you,' said the chat. It climbed down from the recliner and waddled to the waffie-textured globe in the middle of the living room. The surresper's rubbery lips sucked the datad from the chat's paws; the show began unfolding even before the chat could scramble back up into Iris's lap. 'Yi-eee!' It looked behind itself just in time to see the three-dimensional projection of the owl, yellow eyes glowing and talons extended, come swooping toward it. 'Gott im Himmel!'
'Freeze image.' With the chat cowering against her stomach, Iris dropped her voice to the surresper's instruction band. The insubstantial owl stopped in mid-air, its broad, powerful wings buckled at the beginning of their upstroke. 'Roll-out context twenty meters, then processor standby.'
'Don't let it get me . . . '
'Come on; you know it's not real.' Iris peeled the chat away from her midriff and let it climb down from her hands to the floor, before she got up from the recliner. 'Sit over there in the corner, okay? I've got work to do.'
The surround-esper had cost a lot of money, some of which she was still making monthly payments on to the police department's credit union. But compared to the cheap-ass flat-rez espers that were standard issue for the department, working with something like this was worth the debtload. Iris stood face to face with the owl; the projector's feed-in loop set a convex reflection of her image at the dark center of the creature's eyes. 'Magnify,' she told the surresper. 'Two ex.'
A second of pixel blur, then the owl's image doubled in size. The chat squeaked in alarm and dived beneath a pile of dirty laundry. Iris stepped closer to the owl, being careful to duck her head beneath its outspread wings. She hated the sensation of any body-part moving through apparently substantial objects. It made her feel like a ghost, as though she were the unreal one.
She was looking for something in particular, a bright bit of metal. If this thing's valuable, she had figured, then somebody must own it. She found the proof of that logic in the band on the owl's leg, above one set of splayed, scimitar-curved claws. 'Isolate quarter-meter section, enlarge another two ex.'
The owl's foot doubled in size again, like a display of a device efficiently designed for the seizing of prey. Iris felt a chill around her heart, the last of the fuzzy warmth from the chat's topical exudations breaking down in her bloodstream. She leaned in toward the claws, close enough to read the incised markings on the owl's band.
'Memo record.' The string of digits was probably no more than a private ID code, but she recited them one by one anyway. The other words, at the lower edge of the metal band, were the more significant ones. 'Property,' Iris read aloud, 'of the Tyrell Corporation.'
That explained a lot, right there. Specifically about why her boss Meyer had had this particular assignment to hand out. Anything to do with the company that made the replicants the blade runners hunted down — even if that company was now out of business — was of interest to the division. Even a bird.
Iris stepped back from the image. Resize one-one.' The owl, caught in mid-flight, zipped back to the size it would have been in reality. She turned away from it and scanned the context in which the image had been captured, that the surresper had now laid over the confines of her own apartment. Faintly, the glowing lines of the neon creepers could still be seen, as though they were the secret words and glyphs of a dreaming world beneath the one in which she found herself.
The image of the owl hadn't been caught out of doors; that figured, for such a valuable piece of property. Whoever had owned it — not only the Tyrell Corporation, but somebody inside the company would have made sure to keep it indoors, safe not only from its own natural tendency to fly off into the open skies and freedom, but also from anyone who would've wanted to lay hands on it for sinister purposes. Birdnappers, supposed Iris. There was an ongoing trade in exotic animals, or at least the simulations of them, in the crowded, maze-like souk near the city's heart. In a toxic pit such as LA, sights of any living creature — other than survivor species— were so rare that a biophiliac hunger was generated thereby, which could be assuaged by expensive fakery. Replicants, but of animals rather than human beings. Rumors sometimes circulated, through the souk's shabby booths and security-gridded storefronts, of real animals, fabulously rare species caught in some dwindling environmental niche far from Los Angeles, passing from buyer to seller for dizzyingly astronomical prices. A real owl — it was hard to imagine that any of them still existed in the wild, let alone in the city — would be worth a fortune.
Whose fortune, though? The big question, Iris figured, was who the owl belonged to now, given that the nominal owner, the Tyrell Corporation, was defunct. Who had theownership of the owl passed to? She'd have to root around a little, find out who the survivors and heirs to the Tyrell Corporation were.
'Who, who, who.' Iris spoke the words like the owl's own hooting cry, and smiled. The bird was a hunter like herself; she could admire the sharpness of its claws.
She couldn't make out the details of the high-ceilinged room that the surresper had laid over her own; the light from that other space, dim and fragmentary, cast anemic, wavering shadows with too little strength to keep from being swallowed up by a larger, surrounding darkness. 'Enhance ambient light levels,' Iris instructed the surresper. 'Fifty pink lumens.' She always started a bright-scaled visual scan in the pink zone, the spectrum band that the human eye could perceive. Going white, into the full-bandwidth spectra, added more information, but rarely anything useful. What the eye can see, Iris repeated a basic police-training adage, the eye can find. The corollary being that what the eye couldn't see wasn't important. 'Another ten. Stop and edge-sharp boundaries, probable physical objects, max detail def.'
The high-ceilinged room that the surresper had called up now seemed flooded with daylight, as though the other building's roof had been torn off during some season when the city wasn't being pounded with monsoon rains. Banks of candles, gutterin
g in crystal dishes or antlered in horizontal arcs by the arms of cathedral-style candelabra, had their small teardrop flames almost eclipsed by the multiplied light filling the summoned room.
At the same time, the owl – arrested in its flight, yellow eyes and clawtips gleaming – seemed to shimmer for a moment, as each feather leapt into unnaturally high definition; the effect was as if a rough crayon sketch had suddenly been re-done with a single-hair brush, honed engraving needle, and infinite patience. The outspread claws looked sharp as hypodermics.
The winged creature held her attention again. 'Fact-check basic, taxonomic on down.'
A neutered, dispassionate voice sounded from the surresper. 'Bubo virginianus, commonly known as great homed owl. Adult size varies, generally within range of sixty-three to sixty-six centimeters; wingspread one point four meters. Largest, best-known variety of common owls; former range in wild extending throughout all parts of Northern America—'
'Urban areas?'
It took a second for the voice to switch to another text section of its built-in encyclopedic function. 'On occasion, particularly in areas adjacent to open country or with large, densely forested park zones with small prey opportunities.'
So, thought Iris, it could live in a city. But it'd been a long time since LA had had anything like a park in it, at least in the sense of green, growing things and small edible creatures running around. Other than rats.
The voice picked up again. 'Range in coloration: nearly white in Arctic areas, to dark brown and gray, mottled and streaked markings below.'