by K. W. Jeter
Even the metal-cornered case, dangling from one hand as she walked through the theater lobby, felt like a vacuum-filled semblance of form, nothing with real mass inside — like the perceived apparitions of real human beings that she and Vogel shouldered their way past. Good shit for a blade runner, mused Iris. The stuff played right into the cold attitude needed for the job; she knew she could have opened the case, pulled out its airy toys, and stacked the lobby with leveled corpses without feeling a twinge of empathy.
But that would mean . . .
'Pay attention.' Vogel's words, from some place outside of her, sounded wavery and muffled, as though the air between them had congealed as well. 'We've got work to do.'
That I'm no different. Her thoughts continued to move, slow and unstoppable. From what I hunt . . .
'And not much time.'
All a matter of degree . . .
'If the niacinamide analogue goes off,' grated Vogel, 'and we're still on the wrong side of the alarm system, we're screwed. And dead.'
Iris swiveled her cold gaze toward him. Her tongue felt heavy and stiff in her mouth; her jaws pried themselves open through the sheer force of her will. 'I don't care,' she said flatly.
'I know you don't; that's the hit you took.' Vogel's pupils were two black pinpricks surrounded by ice-blue. He had stopped and turned to face her. 'Look, you might think you're in some timeless zone . . . but you're not.' His words took seeming decades to arrive, one after another. 'The clock is ticking — out there.' He gestured toward the surrounding lobby and its press of impassively curious faces. 'So get with the program . . . and let's get a move on. I'm not fetching the stupid bird for you all by myself.' Vogel ducked his head so he could gaze straight into Iris's eyes. 'It's your job. Remember?'
That one word stirred something to life inside her, as though it were awakening from hibernation beneath meter-thick icefloes. She nodded slowly. 'All right. Let's do it.' With the metal-cornered case weighing a little more in her hand, she shoved past Vogel and toward Elie door marked, beneath tangled layers of graffiti, EMPLOYEES ONLY.
When they reached the top of the bare concrete stairs, Iris heard the clatter of an ill-adjusted projection machine. The door to one side of the landing was open a crack, enough for Iris to see the projectionist asleep in a wooden chair tilted back, his feet on top of is machine, the floor a foot deep in discarded snippets of film like segmented snakes pressed flat and writhing. A flickering cone of light, .dined out of a small square hole in the far wall, resolved into black and white ghost images on the theatre's sagging screen: dead actors, a man and a woman Iris would have had no way of recognizing, were locked in the embrace that had probably killed them, over and over.
'Here.' Vogel nodded toward the elevator doors on the other side of the landing. 'Come on . . . we're running behind.'
Against the low-thermal load of the thermatos in her system, Iris pushed into action. Standard police training enabled her to pry off the control panel, short out the wires, and bring the elevator down a few feet in its shaft. Sparks painlessly stung her hand as she cross-connected another pair of wires, pulled the elevator's dented doors apart.
Lugging the metal-cornered cases, she and Vogel scrambled up onto the elevator's exposed top. The doubled steel cables reached up to the machinery at the building's roof level.
'If we use this thing,' whispered Iris, 'they'll hear it running.'
'Doesn't matter.' Vogel shook his head. 'The theater uses it all the time, for clearing out the audience rubbish to the dumpsters in the basement. There must be twenty years of accumulated trash down there; nobody pays to haul it away. So our friends are used to the sound of the elevator; it's background noise to them.'
The darkness of the elevator shaft, like an underground tunnel turned on end and threaded through the building's vertical axis, smelled like dust and long-dead, enclosed air. Iris closed her eyes for a moment, re-savoring the thermatos's glacial effect on her perceptions. Distant voices of the film being shown in the theater seeped into her consciousness, like pleasing reminders of all the human concerns it had been so gratifying to leave behind, a shed skin with the unoccupied ghost of her own face printed on it.
She felt as if she could have stayed there forever.
But you've got a job to do. It was her own voice nagging her this time, instead of Vogel's. Maybe the thermatos was already wearing off, past its peak levels in her bloodstream.
Without saying anything aloud, Iris knelt down and found the control box connections a hand's-breadth away from the steel cables. There was no playing with the wires necessary; the red UP button was in plain view. She punched it and the machinery above growled and clanked, rustily grinding the elevator toward the next floor.
A push of the STOP button brought the top of the elevator within a few easy inches of being level with the doors and the exposed mechanisms that would slide them apart. Vogel touched Iris on the shoulder. 'Wait a minute.' He took a small device from one of his coveralls pockets and flicked it on. The tiny round dome of a variable-emissions LED pulsed red, then yellow, went dead, then pulsed back on as green.
'Perfect,' said Vogel quietly. He slid the device back into his pocket. 'We're past the alarm perimeter.' He smiled down at her. 'And it didn't go off.'
Iris stood up, keeping the toe of her boot ready on the doors' control button. 'How's our time?'
'About ready for the show.'
She felt a regretful premonition, as if the end of the stilled world of her perceptions was already in view. Being human wasn't pleasant to begin with; going back to it, after even this brief a vacation, was bound to be painful.
Vogel extracted and assembled the necessary gear from the metal-cornered cases, then handed Iris her weapons. 'Here it comes,' he said.
The niacinamide analogue hit her system like an internalized flame-thrower, as the dispersed compound shed its time-delay polymers in a millisecond rush. Her heart pounded in her chest — for a dizzied moment, she wondered if the people on the other side of the elevator doors could hear its drumlike stroke — as a fevered heat boiled through her veins. Her mouth was sucked dry by the kiss of an invisible sun; the sweat coursed from her brow and stung salt into the corners of her eyes.
Then it was over, body heat fading to a normal 98.6 degrees. The thermatos's glacier was gone as well, melted away and revealing the once-again human form it had so efficiently encased and numbed.
She glanced over at Vogel. Even in the elevator shaft's darkness, his sharp-angled face seemed luminous with sweat.
Vogel nodded toward the doors. 'Hit it,' he said.
'Glad to.' Action might distract her from the misery onslaught of the human condition. Iris stepped down on the control button.
The machinery's various interlinked metal struts and rust-covered springs creaked into life, drawing the doors apart. Light spilled into the shaft from the spaces revealed on the other side.
Good luck, in a way: the doors opened onto one of the figures she had viewed on the cobbled-together panel screen in the wreckage of the downed blimp. The man was walking past, automatic rifle slung by a strap over his shoulder, carrying a styrofoam cup filled with coffee from the hot-plate and pot sitting on a folding card table against the far wall. Iris blinked away the sudden glare from the overhead exposed fluorescents, swung up her own rifle and nailed him. The obliterator at the end of her automatic's barrel tumesced for a split second, swelling to soak up the shot's sonic impact, then converting and releasing it as a few degrees of heat that rolled back along the barrel and grip to her hands. Lukewarm coffee splashed across the cracked and scuffed linoleum, as the corpse folded around itself and fell.
Vogel and Iris stepped over the body, into the corridor beyond the elevator doors. The map of the floor's layout, that Vogel had drawn and described to her in the alley below, flashed inside her head and superimposed itself upon the spaces around them.
'That way,' whispered Vogel, pointing to one end of the corridor.
She
was already in motion, sliding her spine along the wall, the automatic's barrel braced vertical against her shoulder. Before she reached it, things went awry: the other man from the panel screen appeared behind her and Vogel, stepping out of the toilet facilities and zipping up his fly. He was faster than the first one had been, and able to dive and snatch up the rifle he'd left propped beside the toilet doorway. A quick brace of shots fanned down the center of the corridor before Vogel's silenced bullet took off the corner of the man's head and sprawled him against the wall, marked red as he collapsed and slid down to the floor.
That was as efficient an alarm as any other could have been. The audible shockwave of the dead man's fire, and its slamming impact into the wall at the opposite end of the corridor, was still echoing inside the space like fading seismic thunder as Iris tossed a smaller piece of her gear into the open doorway beside her.
The long-sustain, notched-spectrum glare grenade bounced into the center of the room, the same one that she had watched before on the panel screen. On its perch, the owl for which she had been hunting unfurled its wings, as the blinding light shot against every surface, annihilating all visibility. A panicked screech sounded from the owl as it leapt futilely from the perch, the chain fastened to the metal band above its claws tethering it from flight. The men in the room had similarly jumped to their feet, automatic rifles swinging toward the open doorway. Some of them had filter goggles on, quickly pulled up over their eyes from where they had been hanging around their necks, ready for just such an assault.
Iris and Vogel had brought their own optic filters into place as well, as soon as she had pulled the pin from the glare grenade. But unlike the goggles of the men in front of them, the LAPD devices were tuned to the specific, shifting notch in the grenade's output; the untuned filters tried to lock onto the notch, but were too slow to catch up with its randomized, skittering pattern.
Which meant that the goggled men in the room were as blind as the bare-eyed ones; in the ensuing chaos, Iris could hear them cursing and barking futile orders to each other. A barrage of automatic rifle-fire fanned through the doorway, wild enough to take out the man standing nearest to the door.
Iris dove to the floor, beneath the hot tracer lines of the others' bullets. Still standing, feet braced apart in the center of the corridor, Vogel returned fire with his own automatic, nailing two of the men in rapid order, sending them sprawling back towards the wall with the wooden perch shoved against it. The owl desperately flapped its wings to get away from the noise and light, but only managed to tug tight the chain fastened to its leg-band. The two remaining men in the room, though still blinded by the glare grenade, swung their rifle muzzles in Vogel's direction, forcing him to break off and fall back against the wall near the doorway as their bullets rattled past.
Flat on her elbows, Iris raised her rifle and took out one more with a quick burst. Before she could swing the muzzle around, the last one remaining leapt headlong in her direction, guided more by desperate instinct than anything else. His chest and shoulders pinned Iris's rifle against her body, the weapon trapped and useless as a broad hand shoved against the side of her face, bending her neck back to its snapping point. The man's fingers dislodged her goggles, and her sight was suddenly filled with white, annihilating light.
Blackness welled in the center of that illumination, then Iris felt the body go into a spasm of convulsions; another rapid stitch of rifle-fire tore through one side of his ribcage, the exit wounds within centimeters of her own flesh, the bullet ripping through the pocket and the lower sleeve section of her leatherite jacket, leaving them in singed tatters.
Iris shoved the dead weight off herself. The room and the hallway had gone silent except for the fizzing of the glare grenade, its photo-explosive charge finally expended. Able to see now, without the goggles looped around her throat being necessary, she looked up and saw Vogel extending a hand toward her.
'Come on.' Vogel pulled her to her feet. 'We're not done yet. There's at least another two around here somewhere.'
'We'll deal with them on the way out.' Iris picked up the metal-cornered case she had left in the middle of the hallway, snapped it open and extracted a set of less lethal objects. 'First, let's get the merchandise we came for.'
In the room's stillness, the owl had settled down on its perch; the movements of its head, wide golden eyes staring, were still hectic and jerky. 'Take it easy,' crooned Iris softly, as she stepped over the bodies littering the floor. She drew on a pair of heavily padded gauntlets that extended past her elbows. 'We'll be going to a nicer place now . . .'
The owl tried to escape from her as she reached for it, but the chain and leg-band kept it within reach. Averting her face to avoid the blows of its powerful wings. Iris managed to get both her gloved hands upon its body; bringing it against her chest to pinion its desperate exertions, she got it under control.
Or at least for a moment. 'Give me a hand,' she snapped at Vogel. The sense of a living creature, straining to escape and survive, was palpable even through the padding that encased her hands and forearms. She could even feel its tiny heart racing, the quivering of the terrified predator whose shadow had terrified even smaller creatures. The scything claws raked dangerously close to her stomach, the razor point of one almost snagging the cloth of her cowboyshirt. 'Hurry up—'
With his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, Vogel stepped up with a wide, elastic restraining band. The two of them struggled for a few moments with the animal, then at last managed to secure it, the band pressing its wings to its body. Iris slipped an oxygen-permeable bag over the owl, drawing its opening tight over the feet, rendering the claws safe for transportation.
'Let's go.' With one hand still in the heavy leather gauntlet, and the owl tucked in the cradle of her forearm, Iris nodded toward the door. 'Before whoever's left gets organized.'
Vogel preceded her, automatic rifle poised. He posted against the wall beside the doorway, peering cautiously out into the corridor. 'Clear.' He gestured with a tilt of his head. 'Go for the elevator shaft, and I'll be right behind you.'
Her rifle's shoulder strap was long enough that Iris could keep it at her hip as she carried the bound owl with her other hand and forearm. Emerging from the room, she ducked down and sprinted straight for the open elevator doorway, a couple of meters farther down and opposite.
Before she reached it, a brace of rifle-shots crackled from the far end of the corridor. She didn't take time to see what door might have popped open, and how many opponents were behind it; she launched herself toward the darkness of the elevator shaft, rolling her shoulder under her so that she would land on her back.
The exposed metal protrusions on the top of the elevator car dug painfully into her spine, but with both arms wrapped protectively over the owl, she managed to keep it clutched safely against her chest. As she scrambled onto her knees, Iris heard more gunfire coming from both directions in the corridor outside the elevator doors.
From well back in the open doorway, Iris peered out and saw Vogel with his back flattened against the opposite wall, pinned down by and returning the fire from the doorway at the end of the corridor. He saw her and gestured with a nod of his head.
'Over there!' Vogel indicated the doorway from which the remaining men were firing. 'You got a better angle. Push 'em back and I'll be able to make it to the elevator.' A few more shots dug into the floor near him. 'Then we'll be out of here.'
'Got a better idea,' Iris called to him. 'Thanks for the help, but I've got a job to finish.' She reached behind and hit the DOWN button on the elevator's control box. She heard more gunfire, and Vogel shouting something after her, as the elevator started down the shaft, leaving the open doorway above.
The projectionist was still asleep in his booth when Iris climbed down with the bagged owl from the top of the elevator. So many cheap action flicks had played in the theater that the continuing sound of gunfire, barely muffled from the floor above, had merely seeped into his muddled dreams.
Which was also the case with the audience in the movie theater, when Iris reached the bottom of the service stairs and stepped out into the crowded lobby. No one was alarmed by the sounds, fainter here, coming from above. That kind of thing was as common in the real LA as it ever had been in the illusory film world.
Then she was out in the street, with the merchandise tucked against her chest, away from the night rain. Iris quickened her steps, heading for her own apartment, rather than the police station.
8
Two owls perched in the living room of her apartment, regarding her with their preternaturally golden eyes.
'Cross-check items in view.' Iris, spoke to the surresper, giving the machine its next commands. She had already ordered up its data-stored, three-dimensional image of the owl, from when it had been recorded in the late Dr Eldon Tyrell's office suite. Another few quick words had sized and placed the image next to the real, living owl, its claws wrapped around a perch that Iris had improvised from a broom handle and the backs of a couple of chairs. 'Match for specific identity.'
The living owl, extracted less than an hour ago from the room above the downtown movie theater, hooted in mild alarm and ruffled its speckly brown feathers as the surresper played a shifting grid of bright green lines across its form. Iris watched the dance of the lines, waiting for the machine's verdict. She was alone in the room, except for the two owls, the real and the illusory; the real one had frightened the chat even more than its previous re-creation had, sending the small, prey-resembling artificial creature scuttling into the safety of the apartment's bedroom.