by K. W. Jeter
Iris could see past him, to the souk's throng of dealers and merchandise. They all looked real; the trick was in figuring out which ones weren't.
'I'm with you,' said Iris, and started walking.
Intercut
'That was some good footage.' The remote camera operator nodded in appreciation. He leaned back in the swivel chair, so he could see more of the monitor screens arrayed in front of him. 'Got some good action off her.'
Somebody else was looking at the monitors; the camera operator had to swing his chair out of the way of the director, balancing himself with his hands against the edge of the control board. The director brought his face close to the icy glow of the screens, as though he wanted to see through the rows of pixels and into the darkness behind them.
'I don't know . . .' The director's face, tending toward jowly at the best of times, now grew even heavier with the weight of his thoughts. He reached out one broad-fingered hand and rolled the tracking ball in the center of the board; the monitor with the red ACTIVE indicator lit up above the screen, showing the backs of the female blade runner and the taller man walking beside her, filled with a closer angle on their images. The brighter, more lurid lights of the replicant-animal souk spilled past them. 'The details . .. you really gotta sweat the details ...'
'You mean that?' One of the camera operator's fingernails tapped at the monitor's glass. The lower left corner of the screen's image had a splotch of blackish red on it, from where the force of the female blade runner's fist had sent a spattered drop of blood flying onto the hidden lens. 'We've got plenty of area and character texture that we can map and dub in. We can track the cover-fill to match the other cameras. It'll look just like the real thing.' He shrugged. 'Or as much as anything does, these days.'
'That's not what I'm worried about,' said the director. He chewed on the knuckle of one hand, while he waved the other dismissively at the blot on the screen. 'What the hell? Might as well leave that in. It's a nice effect; adds to the impression of realism. The audience will think we planned it that way. So it's better than real, even if that's all it is. Real, I mean.' He punched up another camera, hidden at the edge of the alley's wall; another screen in the stacked ranks of monitors showed the female blade runner and her new companion heading out of the souk, shoving their way through the crowd and the phony animals. The angle caught a bit of a three-quarters profile as she walked by the unnoticed camera. She would have been pretty enough — in a coldly near-perfect way — to have starred in some other, more obviously fictional, kind of drama if she had occasionally smiled. But the director knew that would have spoiled the particular effect he was going for. 'What concerns me is the loss of control. That's the worst.'
'What do you mean?' The camera operator glanced over at him. 'Everything is under control.' He gestured at the monitor screens. 'There's nothing that can happen we're not going to get tape on.'
'Don't be an idiot. That's not the problem.' The director slowly shook his head. 'We're not using digitized actors here. Those lucasoids will do whatever you want, whatever you program them to do. That's their nature. But not these guys.' He gestured again at the screen. 'Especially her. We've introduced an uncontrolled element into our mix — and not only uncontrolled: unforeseeable. And that can be disastrous. Believe me, I'd know; I've worked this blade runner stuff before. Very sticky. And dangerous; people can get hurt. Bad hurt, as in dead.'
'Let's get rid of her, then.' The camera operator's shoulders raised in a shrug. 'We can do without her. Like you said, digitized actors are a lot more obedient. And let's face it' — his smile looked both sick and ugly — 'nobody will miss her. And we are in that kind of territory where we can get her ass iced pretty quickly. It's one of the simpler production problems.'
'Thanks for the advice. Now shut up.' The director's words turned vehement. 'You don't even have a frickin' clue about what we're doing here. This is not your usual production.'
'Whatever.' Obviously miffed, the camera operator folded his arms across his chest. 'You want to jerk around with real stuff, instead of taking the easy and better route? Not my problem. You're the boss.'
'That's right.' The director let his gaze wander across the myriad screens, a wall of images from the various camera feeds scattered around LA. 'Like God in His domain . . .' He reached out and placed his wide fingertips on the glass separating him from the images of the female cop and her new companion, pushing their way through the anonymous crowds. 'I call the shots.'
The camera operator raised an eyebrow as he glanced sidelong at the figure beside him, but said nothing. This job, he might have spoken aloud, was no worse than any other.
Just different.
5
A vast, oblivious deity seemed to smile down at them from above.
They weren't far from where the remnants of the escaped replicant Enesque had been scraped from the sidewalk. Iris could recognize the surrounding buildings from recently imprinted memory. The artificially generated cloud, lower than the darker and stormier ones above, remained clinging halfway up the towers, as though it had hissed steamlike out of the retrofitted ductwork. Looming overhead, as she and Vogel rounded one building's corner, was the geisha's immense image, smiling as mysteriously as before, daintily placing the tiny pill in her mouth, lips as red as her lacquered nails. The gesture had always struck Iris as vaguely sacramental, a sinister communion.
'You see? Lot less crowded around here.' Leading the way, Vogel glanced over his shoulder at Iris, his own smile less pleasant than that of the Asian woman above. 'Back at the souk you can hardly breathe. Not that you'd particularly want to.'
She had noticed the density of human bodies starting to thin out as they'd passed by the exact building where she'd had her final, elevated tussle with Enesque. Coming around to the opposite side of the building, the sidewalks were practically deserted. 'What's the deal?'
'Superstitious dread,' answered Vogel. He kept walking, hands in the pockets of his duster and shoulders hunched forward, as though leaning into a wind. 'That's a very powerful motivator for a lot of street types. They don't have the same kind of keen, logical, scientific minds that you and I do. So when something big happens in a specific place, an event with spooky overtones, they tend to get their fear and reverence impulses mixed up, and give the whole zone a wide berth. Like a reverse pilgrimage: the place is holy, so you don't go there.'
'What was so big that happened around here?' Iris didn't figure it could have been anything to do with her tracking down and retiring the replicant Enesque. That was too much of a business-as-usual event for anyone to get excited about it.
'See for yourself.' Vogel stopped at the corner of the next building and pointed ahead.
Iris caught up with him and looked where he was pointing. An open space stretched out among the buildings; not as big as the souk, but large enough to contain an impressive pile of wreckage. Curved steel girders, interconnected into a crumpled framework, darkened with both rust and ashy scorch marks, had gouged their way through the street's asphalt and concrete, drawing jagged trenches into the hidden soil meters beneath. Scraps of tattered metallic cloth fluttered from the metal, more like unraveling bandages than flags.
'Oh.' Iris had a notion of what the wreckage represented, what it had been before the crash. 'It's the blimp.' The fragments of cloth sheathing had been the tip-off, along with the spiky antennae that could be seen protruding from junction points on the steel frame. Underneath the limited spectra of the widely spaced mercury-vapor streetlamps, glass shards glittered jewellike on the ground, from the broken lenses of the undercarriage's swiveling searchlights. 'This is where it came down.'
'Correction. This is where it was brought down.' With one raised fingertip, Vogel traced a quick diagonal slash through the air. 'By the rep-symps.' He glanced inquiringly at her. 'Savvy the word?'
'Get real. This is stuff I got in basic training. You're talking replicant sympathizers.'
'Very good,' said Vogel. 'Glad to see yo
u're up to speed on these things. I wasn't sure you would be, since we're talking history rather than current affairs. Nobody's seen a lot of the rep-symp groups recently.'
'Maybe they wised up.' Iris gave a shrug. 'Maybe the penny finally dropped for them, that replicants aren't anything to be sympathetic about'
'Maybe.' Vogel slowly nodded. 'Or maybe somebody wised them up. Did their thinking for them, in a terminal way. So they wouldn't be bothering anyone else with their crazy ideas. Get what I mean?'
'If anybody iced those solid citizens, it wasn't the blade runner division. We've got more important things to take care of. Like the escaped replicants this crowd was so nuts about. Not that they accomplished anything on the replicants' behalf.'
'That's the official line, huh?' Vogel smiled indulgently at her. 'The rep-symps were just nuisances? Maybe so, but you gotta admit, some of 'em did a good trade at that sort of thing. Quite a spectacle when they brought down this UN advertising blimp. It'd been cruising around above LA for years, so long that when it crashed it had pretty much become a regular part of the urban landscape.'
'Sorry I missed the fireworks.'
Vogel kept smiling. 'There'll be more. Come on.'
He led the way, out from the relative shelter that the buildings' exterior had provided. The rains had picked up again, the monsoon liquefying above the entire Los Angeles basin. With her hair plastered against her skull and the back of her neck, Iris sloshed across the poorly drained asphalt behind Vogel. Approaching the blimp's wreckage produced a chill under her skin several degrees lower than the water seeping through her jacket's seams. It looked less like some corrosion-ravaged techno-artifact than a ruined, Gaudiesque cathedral wrapped in night shadows, the glaring streetlamps substituting for the appropriate cloud-streaked moonlight. Its angular net of shadows fell across Iris as she stopped and looked up the framework's elliptic curve. The crossing lines were like a sketch of a cage, superimposed upon her own elongated silhouette.
'Come on in.' Vogel had used some of the crumpled framework's lower crossbars, the ones that had cut angled trenches through the street's asphalt, as a rough ladder to the dead blimp's midsection. He lifted a flap of the metallic fabric and gestured to the darkness inside. 'It's cozy. You'll like it.'
Both statements were inaccurate. When Iris had climbed up after him, then down into the blimp's partially collapsed abdomen, she found that cozy translated to claustrophobic. 'Like being swallowed by a whale,' she said aloud.
'Not that bad.' Using a vintage World War II military-issue Zippo, Vogel started setting candles alight; fastened by their stalactite-like drippings, the wax tapers were studded all over the metal ribs surrounding him and Iris. The flickering ambient light they provided slowly increased as Vogel moved around the ramshackle space, bearing the tiny flame in one hand. 'I call it home.'
'Charming.' With her fingertips, Iris tested the curved horizontal rib behind her back; its edge was as sharp as a honed knife. Falling asleep here would be like nesting among razorblades. 'You must get interesting visitors.'
'You're the first.' Vogel flicked off the Zippo's flame and restored the small metal rectangle to his pocket. 'I'm not by nature a sociable creature.'
'I'm flattered.' Iris supposed she and Vogel had at least that much in common. She looked up to the tentlike vault of the space. Someone, probably Vogel himself, had stitched together enough of the blimp's tattered sheath remnants to shelter this small area from the weather. The ,rain drummed against the metallic fabric, then gathered in its folds and valleys, forming thick rivulets that sluiced along the wind-billowed sides. In the massed, yellowish candlelight, the effect was primitive and cavelike, as though this small pocket of LA had devolved even further to archaic times. 'But don't think you have to go to any special effort.'
'For you, sweetheart, it's no trouble.' Vogel tugged at a section of the fabric, draped over some large object beneath. 'God knows I want you to be happy.'
'What's this?' With the fabric removed and piled on the sagging floor, the object was revealed as a broken section of wall, extending farther than Vogel's height and covered with a regular pattern of minute, translucent bumps.
'Section of the advertising panel that used to be on the exterior of the blimp. Back when it was a going concern, pre-crash, the UN's off-planet emigration program used it to bombard the citizenry with all those lovely images of what life is like out in the far colonies. Along with that unctuous sincere voice spieling out those promises: A chance to begin anew, yack yack. Probably worth bringing this puppy down just to get rid of that particular bit of urban pollution. Life's hard enough in LA without being constantly told about how much better it's supposed to be somewhere else.'
'Suits me fine.' Iris shrugged, watching him plugging in a series of cables to the bottom of the panel. 'If you don't like it here, why not leave? Like you said, the UN's always looking for more emigrants.'
'I'm not that stupid.' Vogel's expression soured as he fussed some more with the cables. He licked the multiple-pronged end of a plug before sticking it into its matching socket. 'There are things,' he said darkly, 'I know about the UN emigration program . . . that you don't.'
'What kind of things?'
'Maybe you'll find out someday. If you're unlucky.' Sparks sizzled off the back of Vogel's hand as he twisted the plug and socket closer together. 'Besides . . . I can't leave. I've got work to do here.'
'So do I.' Iris found a spot she could lean back against without slicing herself. 'So maybe we should get down to it. Whatever you brought me here to see.'
'Relax,' said Vogel. 'Show's about to start.' He dropped the cable, connected to his satisfaction, and kicked it beneath the lower edge of the suspended panel section. With his thumb and forefinger, he snuffed out some of the candles he had so carefully lit only a few minutes before, dropping the panel into shadowed darkness. 'I'm sure you'll enjoy it.'
The panel lit up, eye-stinging bright, as Vogel jabbed the largest button on a fist-sized, portable data-playback unit that had been spliced into the tangled cables. From somewhere else in the blimp's crumpled steel framework, Iris could hear a gasoline-powered electrical generator cough and wheeze into chugging life.
She shaded her eyes against the sudden glare. 'Could you turn it down?'
Just a second.' Vogel's blurred outline was visible against the light. 'The pixel elements have to run through a hardwired display cycle before we can get to the good stuff. The stuff that I put in.'
The glare shifted downward in intensity; through the fingers in front of her eyes, Iris could see shapes forming on the panel section. She dropped her hand and saw the pixels blurring together, then sharpening into the off-world vistas that the UN's advertising sections had used to entice potential emigrants. A disembodied male voice boomed from a tangle of cabinetless, raw speaker drivers that hung from one of the overhead steel ribs: 'A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies . . . the chance to begin again—'
'Enough of that crap,' growled Vogel. The voice went silent as he punched another set of buttons on the portable playback unit. The panel went dark, then was instantly filled with another image.
That Iris had seen before. The bright golden eyes of Scrappy the owl, like fire-heated coins, glared out from the panel. Enough of its surroundings were visible, with the soft, shifting glow of candlelight against expensive wood, to show that its perch remained in the former Tyrell Corporation headquarters.
'Where'd you get this?' It hadn't been that long since she had seen this particular playback, summoned by the surresper in her own apartment. 'This data record is an official police document.' She didn't know that for sure, but it was worth assuming. 'Penalties for unauthorized possession can be pretty unpleasant.'
'I'm so scared.' With his lanky arms folded across his chest, Vogel slowly shook his head. 'If the LAPD got on the case of everybody who cracked into their files, that's all they'd spend their time doing. Let's face it, the cops don't have the money to spend on the kind of secur
ity systems that would keep the average twelve-year-old from going through their files, looking for celebrity dirt and fatal gun-wound photos from the autopsy archives. So I'm not sweating it. Besides' one eyebrow raised — 'how do you know I'm not authorized?'
'Because,' said Iris, 'then you'd be a cop. Like me. And you're not.'
'Touché. I can see why they give you the hard jobs to solve.' With his thumb, he pointed to the panel behind him. 'Like your problematic owl.'
'I'm beginning to think it was less of a problem before you came along. Look, you said you had something to show me, some kind of information I could use.' Iris nodded toward the owl's magnified image on the panel screen. 'If you're only going to show me stuff I already know about — such as what an owl looks like — then I'm not impressed. I was doing better on my own.'
'Like I said. The good stuff's about to start.' Vogel punched another button on the playback unit. 'Settle back and enjoy the show.'
The image of the owl, in two dimensions rather than the 3D in which she had seen it at her apartment, was equally impressive as it unfurled its broad, powerful wings and took off from its perch. As the similarly flattened, coldly smiling image of the late Dr Eldon Tyrell watched, the owl flared its claws and pounced upon the white rat on the Oriental carpet, then flapped to its perch with its struggling meal.
'Seen it,' said Iris. 'Big deal.'
'Ah; of course.' Vogel gave a nod. 'I expected you had. But what you've seen is the owl in question, as it was. Where and when, in the past. But let me show you something new.'
Another punch of a button, and the scene on the panel changed. Subtly: leaning forward from the sharp steel rib behind her, Iris had to peer closely to make out any difference at all. The light in the scene had changed; it was different and more complete in its spectrum from the blimp chamber's surrounding candlelight. And it gleamed from the perch on which the owl sat, turning its avid predator gaze from one angle to the next. Wood, thought Iris. The perch at the Tyrell Corporation had been made of metal.