by K. W. Jeter
Iris had a good idea of what was going to happen next. Feeding time.
She wasn't disappointed. An artificial owl could be kept going on all sorts of things, including a fresh set of batteries inserted under some feathered hatch between its wings. But a living one had a predator's appetite, for other, smaller living things. She didn't need the surresper's encyclopedic function to tell her that. It was the way of the world, this one or any other.
She saw the image of the owl rising higher on its perch, spreading its broad wings partway open, then settling them tapelike around itself again. The aroused hunger was apparent.
That's an expensive meal, thought Iris; she watched as Tyrell's image lifted a white rat by its pink, hairless tail from the silver bowl. The gray and brown vermin that scuttled through the strata of LA's rubbish-filled alleys weren't worth much, but one like that, a real one, could command a good price among the dealers at the souk. The white rat was bent into a soft C shape by its pink feet having been bound together by a tight circle of what looked to be nylon thread. A high-pitched, terrified and terrifying squeal sounded in both the illusory room and Iris's surrounding apartment as the dangling creature wriggled and jerked like a hectic, spring-driven toy.
'Is this what you want? Hm?' Tyrell lifted the struggling white rat higher. The owl on the other side of the paneled room responded by leaning hungrily forward on its perch, a stroke of its outfurled wings maintaining its balance.
I don't need to see this, thought Iris.
With a snip of a tiny pair of scissors from the writing desk's top drawer, the image of Dr Tyrell cut the circlet of thread around the white rat's feet. Its frantic gyrations turned wilder, almost pulling the hairless tail from Tyrell's grasp.
With a flick of his hand, Tyrell tossed the white rat into the center of the room. The rat's image landed a few inches away from the tips of Iris's boots and froze in place, its bright red beadlike eyes fastened on what it had spotted across the illusory space.
'Run,' Iris spoke aloud, though she knew it would do no good. 'Under the desk.' What she was watching happen had already happened. 'It won't catch you there.' And what had happened couldn't be changed.
She turned her own gaze, hearing the audible displacement of air as the owl's image spread its great wings and leapt from its perch. The owl appeared to fill the center of the room, with no magnification necessary from the surresper that had summoned it into being. Its claws spread apart, into the perfect machinery of capture and death. Beneath the owl's swift shadow, the white rat crouched down, too far into the paralysis of fear to do otherwise.
'Okay, stop.' Iris closed her eyes. 'I mean, freeze. Freeze action.' She didn't open them as she gave more instructions to the surresper. 'Search for other discrete sequences, time separate from current display.'
The apartment was silent for a moment, as the surresper probed the rest of the data she had fed into its soft mouth. 'Found,' it announced at last. 'One sequence. Commence playback?'
'Sure.' Whatever it was, it couldn't be worse than the coldly smiling Dr Eldon Tyrell. 'Commence.'
Another illusory room snapped into perceived existence, laid over the more solid walls of Iris's apartment. It looked just as luxurious, dipped in the Tyrell Corporation's endless well of money. The image of a man stood waiting in the center of the room; younger than Tyrell, as just about anybody living would be. A long, shabby-looking coat, that he'd probably slept in on more than one occasion, dark hair cropped close, almost to a buzz coat, utilitarian and unfussed with; not bad-looking, Iris judged, with a small, faded scar on one side of his chin, and intense, angry eyes. His disgruntled, world-sick expression made him appear harder and more mean-spirited than he really was. Iris smiled to herself, spotting the thinness of the man's tough-guy façade. Scratch a cynic, she thought, and wound a romantic. She didn't bleed that particular way, herself.
She could see where it would've been a problem for this guy, whoever he was or had been. The image standing in the center of the newly summoned illusory room was obviously a cop; even without spotting the bulge of his high-calibered gun under his coat, Iris had been sure of that much. And a cop with soft notions about the world, about what could and couldn't be expected in it, was already bound hand and foot to the breaking arc of the Wambaugh Curve. This one was already burnt out; even with only the optical sensory data, and no actual physical presence to work from, Iris could just about smell it on him. Must've reached his limit. Iris peered closer at the man's image, as though she were a coroner examining a specimen stood upright on a vertical slab. But kept going, anyway. She frowned; it usually took a lot of pressure to get some curve casualty like this out on the job again. Somebody in the department put the screws to him. Who?
'Freeze image,' Iris instructed the surresper. 'ID male subject in immediate view.'
The answer was in the open-access files, corning back at her within milliseconds. 'Last name of male subject,' the surresper spoke flatly, 'is Deckard. First name, Rick.'
'LAPD?'
'Affirmative. Male subject, Deckard, Rick, last known employment with Los Angeles Police Department.'
Last known? Something had happened to the poor bastard. Things usually did, when a burnt-out case didn't care what happened to him. 'What division?'
'Male subject, Deckard, Rick — attached to replicant escapee, detection and interception.'
Iris hadn't been expecting that. 'This guy's a blade runner?'
'Slang designate recognized for indicated departmental division.' The surresper's vocabulary parsing functions stepped through the rest of their logic. 'Thus, affirmative.'
Thought I knew them all. Iris put the tip of her forefinger to her lips, mulling over this revelation. She was familiar with all the currently active blade runners, inasmuch as they represented the competition she needed to stay on top of. And the inactives, the dead or no longer functional — either burn-outs or those who had managed to get themselves safely promoted or transferred out of danger, usually in the form of sticking the barrels of their own guns into their mouths were in her mental database as well. Or so she had thought. But this Deckard person was an unknown, a blank in that record. Which meant that she had either overlooked him somehow — she immediately dismissed that possibility — or something else had happened to him, a data erasure of some kind. And it had happened at the division level, figured Iris, instead of farther up; if the deliberate hole in the data had been created by a departmental action, by the real and spooky powers above her boss Meyer, then they would have taken out this Deckard's regulation profile as well, instead of leaving his name and divisional affiliation behind to ID him with.
'Interesting,' mused Iris aloud. 'Very . .
'What is?' The chat, now stationed by her ankles, looked up at her. 'The only thing more curious than a hole, where something should be, is a partial hole. You know?' She smiled down at the chat. 'If somebody's got the power to remove it, they should have the power to remove it all the way, without leaving little pieces behind. And if they want to remove it in the first place, why wouldn't they want to remove it all?'
'Dunno.' The chat shook its head. 'Cuddle?'
'Later. I'm still working.' The tingling, subdermal numbness in her fingertips had already ebbed away, along with whatever woozy endorphins had been produced by handling the chat. That was fine by Iris: figuring out a new assignment's intricacies, sniffing the trail of the tiny and fragmentary data and where they led to, gave a better high.
This Deckard thing . . .
She had the sense, down in the base of her gut, that it was important. Though what a partially deleted blade runner could have to do with tracking down an escaped pet owl, she didn't have a clue on yet.
'Resume playback.'
The owl showed up again, in the surresper's current discrete sequence. Only for a moment, sitting on a different metal perch, but with the same alert and round, golden eyes, scanning the territory in front of it. Which this time included the image of a woman coming into t
he illusory room. She looked even colder and harder than the blade runner Deckard, though she was obviously younger and, by objective standards, prettier. The woman looked as if she had been dipped in money as well, gilded by its transforming power into another piece of the Tyrell Corporation's expensive furnishings. Her dark hair was done up in some kind of retro fashion, like the brittly unpleasant rich girl in an ancient black and white movie; the image's makeup had the over-precise, controlled sexuality that Iris associated with virgins and mental patients. Iris shook her head and looked away, giving in to her own deep, instinctive dislike of the young woman, without bothering to figure out what about her had triggered such a quick aversive reaction. Maybe she reminded me of somebody . . .
In the illusory room, in the surresper's brief snippet of reconstructed past, the two images exchanged a few words — and then it was over. 'Sequence terminus,' announced the machine.
'That's it?'
'Affirmative.' The circuitry inside the surresper didn't care, one way or the other. 'Loaded data contains two chron sequences, optical and auditory representation. Viewing of first sequence aborted before terminus, upon command; second sequence played through.'
Not much to go on, grumped Iris to herself. There had been only a quick glimpse of the owl, looking exactly as it had in the other sequence, and a few words exchanged between the images of the woman and the cop named Deckard. She had barely paid attention to what the two had said; she'd been paying attention to the owl, over at the side of the reconstructed space. The bit had been so brief and uninformative that Iris had to wonder why Meyer had included it in the first place.
'Play it again,' suggested the chat, sensitive to her mood. This time, she listened to what the two images said.
Do you like our owl? That was the first thing the woman said to Deckard, as she'd walked into the room and caught him looking at it. The woman's use of the word 'our' confirmed what Iris had already surmised: the owl belonged to the Tyrell Corporation itself.
It's artificial? Deckard had asked an obvious, and logical, question in return. Owls of any kind weren't seen every day.
Of course —
'Freeze sequence,' Iris instructed the surresper. Now that she'd heard it correctly, it didn't make any sense. 'Back five seconds, resume sequence action.'
The woman's image said it again, in her cold, unemotional tone: Of course.
Meaning that the owl was artificial, as Deckard had asked. Or that the woman had believed, at that time, that it was.
Iris listened to the rest of the image's 'dialogue.
Must be expensive. Deckard again.
Very, said the woman's image.
Iris halted the surresper's playback once more. The words, these in addition to the others, made even less sense than they had before. She stepped closer to the woman's frozen image, studying it, trying to figure out if that one word had been either a deliberate lie or a simple mistake. An artificial owl of this quality would have been expensive, all right, but not enough to brag about. Larger and more complicated avian simulacra, emus and ostriches and the like, even down to nanotech-stuffed hummingbirds, could be obtained easily enough, at the souk in the center of LA. A noodle stand could afford a mascot like that; Iris herself patronized one down the street that had a brace of artificial fresh-water arawanas swimming in a tank behind the cash register; those fish had never been anywhere near the Amazon where their biological prototypes had been sourced. Whereas a genuine living owl, sitting on a perch at company headquarters, would have really been something for a Tyrell Corporation representative to brag so haughtily about; that kind of expenditure, on top of the, already lavishly appointed surroundings, would have indicated a whole other level of wealth and power.
'Thinking?' The chat tapped at her shin with one of its tiny paws. She nodded. "Tis a mystery.' Her words were followed by a shrug. 'But that's the kind of thing I get paid to figure out.'
There was one more scrap of information to be gotten out of the second discrete sequence on the surresper. At the very end of the bit, the image of the woman spoke her name. Iris played it back, to make sure she got it right.
I'm Rachael.
That was what the woman had told the cop named Deckard. Iris mentally filed the info away, and forgot about it for the time being. She had more important things to worry about right now, such as where this missing owl had gotten to. This woman in the data she'd fed to the surresper, Rachael whoever, had probably been caught up in the collapse of the Tyrell Corporation, along with everybody else who had been connected to the replicant-manufacturing company. Not a big deal — at least that part wasn't.
'Go back to the first discrete sequence.' The room with the cop named Deckard and the snotty young woman disappeared, replaced
by the other illusory one that held the owl and the late Dr Eldon Tyrell. With his silver bowl on the antique writing desk, and the white rat he had tossed onto the center of the room's intricately loomed Oriental rug . . .
This time, Iris watched the sequence all the way through. The owl did what its own biological nature had programmed it to do. The claws that catch, Iris found herself thinking, remembering some scrap of a nonsense poem. It wasn't nonsense to the white rat, whose programming was to die.
The image of the owl flapped to its perch, where it bloodily disassembled its meal. Still coldly smiling, the image of Dr Tyrell watched, then picked up the empty silver bowl and carried it away, back into the darkness from which it had emerged.
'Sequence complete,' announced the surresper.
Whatever, thought Iris. 'Terminate session.'
The illusory room, with its candlelit, cavernous spaces and glossy, expensive wood paneling disappeared, restoring Iris's own, smaller apartment.
The neon had died.
It happened sometimes. Iris found herself in darkness, relieved only by the horizontal slots of blueish streetlight coming in through the apartment's small shuttered and barred windows. The chat was freaked by the sudden gloom, and clung to her ankle, shivering. The neon's power source, usually a parasitic tap on a main feeder circuit, had probably gotten over-extended and had snapped at some critical corner junction. That left only the pencil-thin glass tubes covering the walls and nearly every other hard surface, to be broken up and swept away, ghost-like vacated letters and pictographs.
I'll just clear off the bed, thought Iris. If she woke up surrounded by shards and needles of broken glass, it wouldn't be the first time.
'Residual data left,' announced the surresper. 'From encyclopedic function.'
At the bedroom door, still hobbled by the frightened chat, Iris glanced back at the machine. 'All right,' she said. 'Give it to me.'
'“Large, varies in color, nearly white when found in Arctic conditions, mottled dark gray and brown otherwise . . .”'
'I already heard that bit.' Iris shook her head. 'So it's a bird,' she said disgustedly. 'That's all it is.'
There was more: '“Once thought to possess supernatural powers, due to ability to see in the dark; solemn, prepossessing aspect gave rise to being considered as symbols of wisdom or occult knowledge.” End of data.'
'Even better,' said Iris sourly.
But the surresper had switched itself off, and wasn't listening.
4
The soukmeisters were clever bastards.
Gotta hand it to 'em, thought Iris. She stood in the neon-stitched darkness and let herself be buffeted by the jostling crowd around her. The people who ran the marketplace in artificial animals, the shadowy figures who collected the rents on the densely packed stalls and storefronts, had gone to the trouble and expense of making the place smell as if real animals were being bought and sold in it; the zone was interspersed with scent-emitter units protruding from the sewer grates that gave off a cycling olfactory parade of sweaty barnyard odors, moldering grain feed mixed with the riper, nastier tang of unswept fecal droppings. Iris could see that the dealers' customers obviously went for it; the sensory impression filling their no
strils added to the illusion of purchasing a real, biologically living animal, rather than some battery-powered replicant sheathed in fake fur or feathers.
Careful not to step in any of the more realistic props that had been deposited in the street, Iris pushed her way through the crowd toward the open-fronted, double-wide stall with the sizzling neon above that read WINGS OF GOLDEN SMILE. An animated sparrow, twenty times life-size and outlined in glowing blue, flapped its wings through a stuttering, three-step drill, over and over.
'What can I do ya for?' The half-dozen staff behind the stall's counter looked like brothers of a single family, a genetic mélange like any other in LA; this specific one could have been a third-generation cross of Hmong and Vladivoski squareheads. 'How 'bout a canary? It'll sing you to sleep. If that doesn't work for ya' — the lead counter guy winked at her — 'then you and I can make other arrangements.'
'Put it back in your pants, pal.' Iris leaned forward, looking past him and into the depths of the stall. The other staff turned from their workbenches and abacus, regarding her with impassive silence and ink-black pupils as she scanned the wares on the dangling perches and inside the wire cages. Most of their stock consisted of smaller birds, but there was a pair of ravens — bigger than she had expected them to be, hulking like sullen murderers on a rusting steel perch and even a redtail hawk, staring at her with one glittering yellow eye. So maybe the tout at the edge of the souk, who Iris had queried and then tipped with a pre-devaluation titanium quarter, had been right about this being the place for predatory birds. 'I'm looking' — Iris leaned away from the counter guy's kimchi-scented breath — 'for an owl.'
'Owl, huh? You mean a regular horned owl or something more exotic, like a winter-plumage snow owl? Doesn't matter.' He turned and shouted over his shoulder to one of the other staff 'Francesco — c'mere a minute.'
The other man approached, wiping his hands on an oil-stained rag. 'Nice shirt,' he said, indicating Iris's chest. Like the rest of the staff, he was wearing a modified Stetson knock-off and shiny neoprene bondage lederhosen that exposed his yellowish and scabby knees. 'I collect Autreys myself. Lariat motif, mainly.'