Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  'Yeah, I got that much.' Iris regarded the owl, suspended in midair, once again. 'Current population status?'

  'Extinct in wild, certainty level one hundred percent. Last captive breeding program terminated, DNA samples discarded as non-viable. Some unsupervised trading suspected among private collectors; no official priority level established for tracking.'

  That was pretty much as Iris had suspected. Government agencies, from the local level right through to the UN, had enough on their hands without worrying about bubo virginianus. In this world, people were an endangered species. It might not have seemed like that, when pushing your way through the packed streets of Los Angeles, but outside the remaining population magnets – LA, Mexico City, Jakarta, the Euro-Disney Workers Paradise, New Beijing – the human gene-pool dried up rapidly. The cities were like the last, luridly fluorescent night-blossoms on a dying bush, roots withering in polluted soil; if humanity didn't get transplanted successfully to the star colonies, then it would be as extinct as the owl and every other creature that didn't make the cut in a toxin-rich environment. Hard to imagine what collectors would be around to trade the last few members of the otherwise dead breed.

  Iris knew all that, and didn't care. She had the same comforting belief system as the generations before her: I'll be gone before the shit comes down. Gone in the sense of no longer being alive. No matter how good she was at the blade runner trade – and deep in her heart, she knew she was the best that her boss Meyer had at the moment – she knew it was a short-lived profession. She wasn't worried about the Wambaugh Curve, the burn-out cycle that tripped up most runners — only wimps and whiners let themselves get tweaked about killing replicants. But eventually, as in any contact sport, even a long-term champ would feel her step slowing by a fraction of a second, the gun in her hand weighing a fraction of an ounce more, coming up and aiming a hair's-breadth too late and a sliver of a degree wide of the fatal mark on the chest of its target — all of which would give that faster, harder and younger target the micro-second gap in time for turning, aiming and firing before she could get her own shot off

  That was the unfair thing about replicants, and why hunting them was, eventually, like betting against the house. They were always, de facto, at their prime; their four-year lifespan, as much as some of them griped about it, meant they were always at the top of their own efficiency curve, at their fastest and smartest and deadliest peak. At least, thought Iris, they don't have to worry about losing a step as they get older. And many of the replicants, especially the ones designed for military combat, had a lot on the ball to begin with; they were to humans as the owl was to the small furry creatures that it seized in its scything talons and tore apart with the cruel machinery of its hooked beak. It was no wonder that the authorities tolerated having blade runners, the next step up in the prey-and-predator chain, running around the streets and firing off cannon-sized weaponry in the midst of the taxpayers and citizens; the alternative was even bleaker. Fat chance of getting the human race to pack up and move out to the stars, with the negative advertisement of escaped replicants, who were supposed to be mankind's slaves and servants in the far colonies, proving how much tougher and more dangerous than their masters they were. In that regard, there was a real PR value in blade runners blowing away the escapees in as public a manner as possible: it showed that everything was still under control, that the gone-bad replicants would be eliminated before they could crush too many people's heads like eggshells. As long, mused Iris bitterly, as they let us do our jobs. Which, as her boss Meyer had indicated to her, was a matter up in the air for the moment.

  That was just more shit destined to come down someday, like the oil-dark rains burdening the black clouds above the city. With any luck, Iris figured, she'd have made her wad by then, rolling up the bounties and socking them away in her retirement accounts, and she'd be able to chill out in her comfy apartment, reminiscing about how good a bullet-warmed gun had felt in her hand, back when she'd been in the game, and watching on the broadcast news as the city's streets filled with blood.

  'So much for the bird.' Iris spoke aloud. From the corner of her eye, she spotted her pet chat creeping out a few inches from its hiding place and regarding the frame-stalled image with acute suspicion and loathing. Iris turned her attention back to the surroundings that the surresper had summoned up, a ghost-walled room now more brightly lit than her own.

  Expensive, as she had figured it would be: wood paneling from some close-grained tree species that was probably reduced to a few acres in New Guinea by now. If in fact the last of the breed hadn't been leveled to provide the board footage for the illusory chamber in which Iris stood. Common knowledge that a lot of high-level corporate execs, with money to burn, indulged in the luxury of species extinction, giving their material comforts a true Après moi, le déluge thrill. It wasn't a complete wipe-out unless any surviving genetic material was taken from deep cryo storage and destroyed, to make sure nobody came along later and recreated one's unique and private possessions. That was probably what had happened to bubo virginianus's DNA samples as well: nothing enhanced the collector's market like scarcity, and nothing enhanced scarcity like death. For animal collectors, extinction — or as close to it as one could get while still leaving a specimen or two alive — was a desirable quality.

  And for the rich, the dead past was a treasure trove as well. The illusory space that the surresper had conjured up was tastefully — not her taste, but someone's — and expensively appointed with true museum-level antiques, bits and pieces from the dead centuries before this dying one. Even with only an optical feed to her senses, Iris could just about smell the hand-rubbed matte patina on the ornately inlaid writing desk standing against one wall on curved legs with gilt-clawed feet. Above it, a circular, convex mirror, surrounded by stylized golden sunrays, showed her own face's image; the surresper's simulator programming had spliced that bit of the real world's data into the illusory one.

  There was another image in the mirror, of someone approaching from a dark hallway on the opposite side of the high-ceilinged room. The hallway's shadows, even with the light enhancement she had ordered from the surresper, all but concealed the figure of a short and slight man frozen in midstep as he headed toward her. The only detail that the light was able to pick out was its own reflected gleam upon a deep silver bowl he carried in one hand.

  'Resume action, half-speed.' Iris stepped back from the room's center, so the man's reconstructed image wouldn't overlap with her own physical presence. 'Maintain enhanced light levels.'

  Even before she had finished giving the surresper its instructions, the owl's wings swept into motion. Iris ducked reflexively as two slow-motion beats, like the furling and unfurling of a magician's feathered cape, brought the creature over her head and onto a metal perch, away from the small flames of the candelabra. The owl's claws seized onto the perch's crossbar; its feathers smoothed into place as it drew the broad wings close to itself. Golden eyes, perfectly round as coins, turned their fierce, unblinking gaze toward the approaching image.

  The man's image, carrying the silver bowl, stepped slowly into the illusory room, where Iris could see him.

  Her first thought was that he looked like death. Her second was that death would look better.

  'Freeze image.'

  The image halted, unmoving as the owl in mid-flight had been. Iris stepped up close to the image, examining the man's face almost nose to nose.

  Between the man and the owl were certain similarities. The man's eyes were magnified by black-rimmed, rectangular-lensed glasses, giving him an owlish look, avidly staring, as though some small prey had been spotted in the patterned Oriental rug that the surresper had laid out underfoot. Skin of wrinkled parchment was stretched tight across the facial bones; the city's rains might never have come in this man's lifetime, leaving him to wither in the deracinating sun beyond the clouds. One corner of the man's mouth had already lifted into a smile as he had entered the room; the kind of smile, i
t struck Iris, that a person got when they were about to indulge in some small, private pleasure. Pleasant for him, thought Iris. Maybe not so much, for anything else.

  She stepped back from the man's image and instructed the surresper again. 'ID male subject.'

  The surresper was silent for a few seconds longer than usual. 'Process failure,' the machine announced. 'No identity file on record for subject in view. Redact command?'

  'Really?' Iris glanced away from the image, and over her shoulder toward the surresper. 'All banks trawled?'

  'Trawled, indices and by-file mode. Still negative.'

  The chat had overcome some of its fear of the owl, and had crept out close to Iris's ankle. 'Wuzzat mean?'

  'Means this guy's one rich sonuvabitch.' Or maybe was, Iris corrected herself. There was always the chance that he was dead already. Either way, it took a lot of money, and the power that went with it, to keep one's personal information out of the LAPD databanks. Tyrell Corporation power? Iris slowly nodded. The odds were in favor of it.

  'Facial scan,' said Iris. 'Block and grid, left profile, left three-quarters, full face, right three-quarters, right profile. Index all possible recognition points for brute-force trawl—'

  'Excuse me.' The surresper interrupted Iris's orders. 'But brute-force ID trawling was made illegal by United Nations Justice Court administrative decree code MMH, executive number 13-4583, reaffirmed on appeal number 565-8891. Adopted as procedure standard by Los Angeles Police Department, command level alphaalpha-zero-point-twelve.'

  'Wow.' Strings of numbers always impressed the chat. 'What's that mean?'

  'Figure it out,' Iris answered irritably. She spoke louder, so the surresper would be sure to hear. 'Override on personal authority. Execute command as given.'

  'Must advise: all override instructions are reported to departmental supervisor.'

  As if I didn't know that. Iris felt a thin smile show on her face. The surresper would fink on her, she knew already; it was wired straight to the LAPD switchboard. Which meant that a piece of paper with her name on it somewhere would land on her boss Meyer's desk. He could either round-file it, or keep it handy for some blackmail possibilities against her. She didn't care which; nobody worked in the blade runner division for very long without racking up a fat file folder of black marks.

  'Proceed,' instructed Iris.

  A job like that would take some time, not in the scanning of the image's face, but in cranking through the match-up with the details of any person, human or replicant, outside the regulation ID bank. With the chat tagging behind her, Iris headed for the apartment's kitchen module to scrounge a cup of something warm. The illusory room's wood paneling had been laid over the door; she walked through the optical data of the burnished woodgrain, not even blinking as the sensory feed passed across her face. The chat had to pluck up its courage and dive through, eyes closed. Tucked into a ball, it rolled against the kitchen module's wall, then scrambled onto the solitary chair at the fold-down table.

  She'd remembered to bring her ring of swipe cards with her; she needed them to get into the freezer compartment of the wall fridge. This is going to be a tough one — that conviction had come over her, even before the surresper had come up blank on the regulation ID process. Better fortify myself. When the LEDs of the freezer locks had blinked to green, Iris opened it and took out the unmarked cylinder of black-market coffee. It wasn't the caffeine levels, way above what the UN's health police allowed, that she wanted so much as the reaffirmed knowledge that she had pulled off tough jobs in the past, and had raked in enough bounties that she could afford a pricey, sold-by-thegram luxury like this.

  'Can I have some?' The chat perched on the back of the chair, its eyes widened into a hopeful expression. 'Please?'

  'Sure.' A thimbleful was all it took to hop the little construct up more than it already was. Any more than that would blow out the tiny teflon-valved heart in its chest. 'You watch it for me, okay?'

  At the sink end of the kitchen module's countertop, Iris carefully defurred and sterilized the interior of her favorite yellow mug, an only slightly chipped antique that read BEANS AND MACHINES - SEATTLE around the side. It'd been a while since she had spent any major relaxing time in the apartment; the last two jobs, the Enesque rep and the one before him, had been practically back to back, with no break between. That was her preferred mode of operating, to stay on the hunt as long as possible, pushing the fatigue barrier away with pure strength of will. But it did tend to shoot the crap out of her housekeeping; entropy moved into the place during her extended absences, and silted the corners with gray, ageless dust.

  As her hands busied themselves in the sink, Iris looked into the tiny mirror, spattered with minute dots of toothpaste and hazed with steam, that she'd hung there when she'd first moved in. She wiped it dear with her sleeve and leaned closer to her image, studying it as she had the one in the illusory room summoned by the surresper.

  'Lookin' good,' Iris whispered to herself. The city hadn't crept under her skin yet, loosening the threadlike sinews that connected her flesh to the bones beneath. Still young and hard. She smiled and nodded. Most people in LA looked as if they had been chewed on by invisible teeth, then spat out, more or less in one piece. Even street punks and trench cases, whole tribes younger than her, and the glossy retro strippers down in the clubs — under the subdermal thin-film silicone frosting of both the real females and the artful transies, the rot had nearly always set in; you could see it in their eyes. This town aged people, as though there were an epidemic of Methuselah Syndrome rolling down the streets; it was a wonder that anyone, human or otherwise, had more than a four-year lifespan.

  Maybe I'll get out, thought Iris. Before I'm that way, too.

  She carried the coffee back into the apartment's front room, and into the illusory chamber that filled it for the time being. 'Results?'

  'Process terminated,' replied the surresper's overly calm voice, 'when exact match found. Male subject in view is identified as one Doctor Eldon Tyrell.'

  Iris managed to find the arm of the recliner and sat down on it. 'Details?' As she sipped at the cup, the chat wandered from the kitchen module, paws wiping its ration of coffee from the round cheeks of its face.

  'Former CEO of Tyrell Corporation. Now deceased.'

  She wasn't surprised. 'Mode of death?'

  'Homicide.' The word as uninflected by emotion as any other in the surresper's vocabulary. 'Perp conclusively identified as one Roy Batty, escaped replicant. Perp retired.'

  Cop talk. Humans were murdered, but replicants were retired. Both were equally dead afterwards. Iris wondered which blade runner had gotten the bounty for this Batty job. Must've been a tough one, she figured. If the replicant had managed to penetrate the security systems of a major outfit like the Tyrell Corporation, he would've had to have been smarter — and more dangerous — than the average escapee. Whoever took him down, thought Iris, should've gotten a bonus. When she got some free time — hardly likely — she'd have to root around in the department records and find out which one of her colleagues it had been.

  So the owl had very likely belonged to Dr Tyrell; a personal pet, funded as a corporate write-off, like the high-ceilinged room's other expensive furnishings, no doubt. Typical exec perk. But if the good doctor was dead, then it wasn't him wanting the owl back. Somebody else at the Tyrell Corporation, maybe; they could probably sell off the bird and make enough to meet the company's payroll for a couple of weeks. But it was her understanding that the Tyrell Corporation was as dead as the doctor who had run it. So there wouldn't be anybody left at the company who'd want to get such a valuable asset back into its possession. Which meant that some third party knew about the creature, knew what it was worth, and naturally wanted to grab it. But if they were using official police channels to track the owl down, instead of going through some private operation, they must have some powerful political connections. Not, figured Iris, the kind of people you want to screw around with.

&
nbsp; The job was getting uglier, and more interesting, at the same time. Which must have been why her boss Meyer had given it to her, rather than some lesser-skilled blade runner. The feeling grew larger inside her gut that the missing owl had more importance than just its money value to black-market real animal dealers and collectors. Which also meant that the process of tracking it down might have some deeper and darker risks attached to it; if somebody as protected as the owl's original owner, the late Dr Eldon Tyrell, could get himself iced, then the chances were good that the creature was flying around out there in the night, over some dangerous territory.

  Cool, thought Iris, nodding to herself. Maybe Meyer really was her pal, after all. This wasn't some hoke job that he'd shuffled off onto her; it was starting to smell like something much bigger. Which meant that there'd be all the more bonus points for her, maybe not in the form of hard cash money, but in recognition from both the higher-ups in the department and from the invisible, string-pulling forces that they served — if she pulled it off.

  'Don't worry.' She turned her thin smile toward the frozen image of the owl sitting on its perch, circular yellow gaze as avid as before. 'I'll find you, all right. You can count on it.'

  The chat echoed her self-confidence pump, bobbing itself up and down in a corner of the room. 'Yeah! You can do it! Know you can!'

  Iris ignored the chat. 'Resume action,' she instructed the surresper. 'Normal speed.'

  Dr Eldon Tyrell's resurrected image, with its unpleasant partial smile, passed by Iris. She watched as the image carried the silver bowl in its hands over to the antique writing desk, and set it dawn. The image looked over its shoulder, still smiling, toward the owl on its perch. For a moment, a tiny spark of something close to recognition passed between the two images, as though each saw in the other's magnified eyes its own reflection.

  The man's image spoke aloud. 'Hungry?' The recorded voice struck Iris as being as mockingly cruel as the smile on Tyrell's face.