Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  'Maybe he didn't,' said Iris. 'If what you're saying is true, it might not have been any operation by the UN emigration program that did him in. It could've been some group right inside the corporation itself.'

  'True.' Carsten raised an appreciative eyebrow as he regarded her. 'We've considered that as well. Which is another reason for our committee to be on its guard. The Tyrell Corporation had contingency plans for any catastrophic event, such as that which leveled its headquarters in LA. It's almost certain that a shadow corporation still exists, carrying out some kind of agenda aimed at restoring its power. If that shadow corporation is headed by the type of individuals who would have no qualms about eliminating their own CEO, then that indicates just how ruthless they are.'

  'Yeah, well, that makes them about on the same level as everyone else. I don't see you and your bunch as being exactly non-violent.' Iris rubbed her upper arms even more fiercely and vainly. 'Look — how much longer is this going to take? I'm freezing here. I mean, I've seen your collection of owls, and now I've seen your collection of eyeballs in jars. What else is there?'

  'Seeing those things is one matter,' said Carsten. 'Understanding them, and what they mean, is another. My committee's operatives didn't round up all the neuro-optical technology that the Tyrell Corporation had paid for, back when it had, been a functioning, above-ground entity, just so we could have some entertaining souvenirs. There's a purpose to everything, even if it doesn't seem quite apparent to you yet.'

  'Fine. Lay it on me before I get frostbite.'

  'Impatience in the pursuit of wisdom might be foolish, but hardly something of which I can disapprove.' Carsten strolled away from her, his calm, unruffled breath hardly creating even the smallest cloud before him. He stood looking for a moment at a wall-mounted metal shelf, lined with more of the floating eyes and softly trailing optical cords. 'These little bits of flesh and nerve tissue — what do you think is so important about them?' He picked up one of the jars and tilted it slightly, studying the contents. The disembodied eye regarded him back with perfect equanimity. 'I mean, what do you think their importance was to Tyrell? Both the man and the corporation, that is. Why did the Tyrell Corporation go to such lengths to subcontract out this part of the replicant technology, instead of doing it in-house with all the rest of the bits and pieces that went into their products?'

  'How the hell should I know?' Iris managed an irritable shrug, even with her arms wrapped around herself. 'Maybe it was cheaper that way, or something like that. Maybe the Tyrell Corporation was just keeping its production costs down. Eldon Tyrell might've been a smart businessman, on top of everything else.'

  'He was all of that; there's no denying it. But he hardly needed to keep his company's production expenditures in line, since those were fully covered by the UN emigration program. The agreement that was put into place when he was handed the monopoly over the replicant industry was that he could pass along all costs to the UN, in any amount, and his company's profits would be added above that line, as a percentage of costs. So you can see, he would be motivated to keep those costs as high as possible, in order to maximize the profits flowing to the Tyrell Corporation.' Carsten shook his head. 'So it couldn't have been a cost-cutting measure, to subcontract out the neuro-optical prototyping work to Chew. Plus, you have to take into account that Eldon Tyrell, both by nature and by logic, was more than a little paranoid about letting any aspect of the replicant technology slip out of his grasp, once he'd gotten hold of it. That's why the Tyrell Corporation headquarters was such a monstrosity, with all of its design and production facilities in one location, virtually right beneath Tyrell himself. That was so he could keep an eye on it all, though that hardly did him any good at the end.'

  'Fine,' said Iris. 'So it doesn't make sense. Then what was it with the eyes? Maybe Tyrell had gotten so paranoid that he couldn't stand being watched, and having all these loose eyeballs floating around, down in the factory, creeped him out too much.' She pulled one hand away from herself long enough to gesture at the shelf of flasks and graduated beakers. 'Hey, I don't particularly care for them, myself. As a decorating motif, they pretty much bite.'

  'True.' One corner of Carsten's mouth lifted in a partial smile. 'But that was hardly the reason someone such as Eldon Tyrell would banish them from the company's headquarters. He had a more serious rationale for that.'

  'Which was?'

  'He was hiding them,' said Carsten simply. 'Or trying to. And before you ask, I'll tell you from whom: from the UN emigration program itself. Eldon Tyrell would have been a fool — which he most assuredly wasn't — if he had let himself trust the same organization that had wiped out his competitors in the replicant industry, merely because they had handed the monopoly on that industry over to him. Tyrell was fully aware that the UN emigration authorities hadn't done that because they were particularly fond of him and the Tyrell Corporation. They had done it because they found the Tyrell Corporation and its CEO useful for their purposes. And Eldon Tyrell also knew that if the moment came when he and his company weren't useful any longer to the UN, the emigration authorities would have little compunction about wiping him out in the same murderous fashion their blue-helmeted thugs had taken out my company and the others in our committee. More than that: the UN emigration authorities would have no choice about eliminating the Tyrell Corporation. They would have to do it, right up to and including the murder of Eldon Tyrell, in order to cover up their own trail of previous actions. They couldn't let Eldon Tyrell go on living after they had shut down the Tyrell Corporation; the only absolute way to ensure his silence would be through his death.'

  'Okay, I got it.' Iris nodded slowly. 'So taking some part of the replicant technology off-site, away from the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, was Eldon Tyrell's way of buying himself insurance against the partners he no longer trusted. If he ever had trusted them, I mean.'

  'Precisely,' said Carsten. 'Tyrell was trying to walk a fine line, between keeping the replicant technology under his control and splitting off just enough of it so that if the UN emigration authorities decided to shift it to someone else, they wouldn't be able to get it all. Or at least they would have a hard time doing it. Hard enough, and risky enough, that his friends at the UN might decide that it was easier — or at least a lot less trouble — to let him go on living, and for them to keep on doing business with the Tyrell Corporation, rather than try to make other arrangements. Arrangements that might not come off, if they weren't able to get hold of the piece of the replicant technology that Tyrell had hidden away at Chew's place.' Carsten glanced around at the icy walls of the chamber. 'And believe me, Eldon Tyrell had made plenty of arrangements to make sure that such a failure would have been a real possibility. When our committee's operatives took the LA Eyeworks building apart, they found all sorts of enhanced destructive capability charges laced throughout the structure, keyed to coded remote-detonation signals that would've been beamed in from the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, while it still existed. In other words, Tyrell had made plans for either contingency, either taking out Chew and his facility or, if it was too late for that, then the big apocalyptic self-destruction he'd wired into his own building complex. Since you've already seen and been through the ruins, you know which one of those possibilities finally came to pass.'

  'So where does that put the UN and its emigration program?' Puzzling over the things that the old man had told her was nearly enough to distract Iris from the chill pressing tighter around her. 'Why should you be concerned about the UN tracking you down because you've got Chew's stuff here? It wouldn't do them much good, anyway, what with the rest of the replicant technology having gone up in smoke.'

  'The UN emigration program can replace everything that went up with the Tyrell Corporation headquarters — or it already has. Most of what they would need for that, the original replicant technology, they scooped up when the blue helmets raided and wiped out Tyrell's competitors — such as my company.' The bitter note was once again audible
in Carsten's voice. 'They didn't just hand everything we had over to Tyrell; they kept enough of the redundant production-line machinery for themselves, in case they would ever want to go into business for themselves. Which is apparently what the UN emigration program is doing now. Our committee has other teams of operatives which have been monitoring various capitalization-intensive construction projects being run by UN front organizations, on the sly. There's a massive underground facility that's nearly finished beneath the Kansas crop-quarantine areas; the UN has got a couple thousand acres of geneticide-blackened landscape to play around in there, with a total perimeter lockdown in effect, supposedly to keep any traces of GM'd wheat DNA from contaminating the still-productive areas farther west. Plus, it has a physical mirror site about halfway completed in a radiation-swept, former industrial zone in the Belorussian stump republic. The UN emigration authorities .have obviously decided that if it's going to take over the replicant technology and run production itself; better to do it in non-populated areas rather than right in the middle of the biggest urban conglom outside of the Shanghai meldplex.'

  'Yeah, I guess that makes sense.' Iris cupped her numb fingers in front of her mouth and blew into them, then shook her hands in an attempt to get the blood moving again. 'That way, if they decide to pull the plug, it wouldn't leave traces that are quite so public as that pile of rubble they've got sitting in the middle of LA right now.'

  'But before they can pull the plug,' said Carsten, 'publicly or not, they've got to get their replicant-technology facilities up and running. The entire UN emigration program hinges upon the production and distribution of cheap slave labor — that is, the replicants themselves to the outer colonies. With the Tyrell Corporation shut down, the program has been able to keep running on a severely minimized basis, drawing upon its stockpiled reserves of animation-suspended replicants. But those reserves are close to running out; Eldon Tyrell managed his company's production rates so that his only customer, the UN, could never get very far ahead in terms of long-term use and storage; it was always dependent upon current production to keep the emigration program going at the rate the UN deemed necessary. So it was obvious, right from the beginning, that neither side trusted each other. An arrangement like that, with mutual paranoia advancing exponentially, can't last forever. And that's why Tyrell squirreled away part of the replicant technology — in fact the most critical part, upon which everything else depends — in Chew's operation.'

  'The eyes?' Iris shifted her own gaze to the mute, compound one held by the jars and their floating contents, then back to Carsten. 'What's so special about the eyes?'

  'That depends, doesn't it?' Carsten's thin, fragile smile showed, as if once again indulging her. 'On what you think eyes are used for.'

  Is that some kind of a joke?' She wondered if the chamber's cold had at last frozen some vital synapse inside the old man's skull. 'What are eyes used for? For seeing, of course. You look at things with them. What the hell else?'

  'And that's all?' Her answer appeared to produce even more mild amusement in Carsten. 'You've never heard that old adage, I take it, that eyes are the windows to a person's soul.'

  'I've heard it,' said Iris impatiently. 'It doesn't mean anything.' 'Why not? Perhaps because souls don't really exist?'

  'Not enough to matter. Not on a practical basis. And even if they do exist, for human beings at least, that doesn't mean replicants have them.' Iris couldn't believe this; she was freezing to death, and also engaged in some obscure theological debate. 'That's probably why replicants flunk the empathy test, why their numbers come out so low when we run the Voigt-Kampff machine on them. If the reps had souls, then they'd be like human beings, and they'd have the necessary empathic faculty to pass themselves off as human. But they don't have that, so they flunk the tests, so they're not like human beings — not really — so they don't have souls, or whatever the word 'soul' is a figure of speech for. QED. Now can we get out of here?'

  'In a minute. You've waited and searched for so long; why be impatient now?'

  'Because I'm cold,' said Iris, 'and tired.'

  'That might be so — but I've got your complete attention, don't I?' Carsten's smile turned even more knowing as, head tilted to one side, he regarded her. 'If you don't want to stay and find out why I brought you here, then you can leave. The door's right behind you.'

  Iris didn't know why she hadn't left already. Maybe because I'm frozen to the floor, she thought. I can't move. But she knew that wasn't it.

  'All right,' said Iris. 'You've got it, like you said. I don't have any choice about staying here. It's fate or something.'

  'Those are the truest words you've ever spoken.' Carsten's smile had vanished. 'Truer than you know.'

  She nodded slowly. 'Don't take all day about it, okay? Tell me what's so important about the eyes.'

  'You don't just see with eyes,' said Carsten softly. 'There's more to them than that. People see into you through them; that's what is meant by their being the windows to your soul. It's an old saying people said it long before there was a Tyrell Corporation, or replicant technology, or even a city called LA. People knew it was true, right from the beginning of time. They recognized that there was a transfer of information at that precise juncture; information relating to identity. Not just who that person is, into whose eyes you're looking — but what that person is as well. You can hardly deny that such is the case. After all — doesn't the Voigt-Kampff machine work, at least in part, exactly on that principle? That the eye of the test subject reveals the ultimate truth? In fact, the individual on the other side of the machine lives or dies based upon what the operator — the blade runner; you, or someone like you — sees in that eye.'

  'It's one factor.' Iris gave another shrug, even stiffer and more uncomfortable from the cold than before. 'Among many. The Voigt-Kampff machine measures pupil fluctuations and other involuntary stress indicators, weighs them together and sorts them out, then gives the operator, the blade runner, a reading that can be interpreted along certain set parameters. That's all.'

  'A diagnosis, as it were.' Carsten's expression held no humor. 'Medically speaking. The blade runner being the doctor looking for a certain congenital, incurable condition. The treatment for which is very brief, and very final.'

  'The LAPD doesn't make us take the Hippocratic oath when we sign on with the blade runner division. "Do no harm" is somebody else's job description, not ours.' A spark of anger flared inside Iris, hearing herself talk as if she were still a blade runner, and hadn't gotten canned off the force. 'That's how,' she said bitterly, 'I remember it, anyway.'

  'But what you don't remember,' said Carsten, 'is ever taking a Voigt-Kampff machine apart, then tracing out its circuits to see if they actually worked as you had been told they did.'

  'I was a blade runner, not some kind of service technician down in the LAPD basements.'

  'Exactly. So you have no verifiable idea of whether the VoigtKampff machine did anything at all, or whether it was merely a prop in an elaborate scheme to make you think it did. Consider the manner in which it was designed; take the bellows component, for instance. What is that supposed to do?'

  Just mentioning it brought an image to her mind's eye, the familiar memory flash of a V-K unit sitting on a table between her and some suspected replicant, the accordion folds of the bellows slowly compressing and expanding, as though the machine itself were alive. 'It samples . . .' It took a few seconds longer to remember what she had been told, back in the division training course. 'It samples the air, I mean the exhaled air from the suspect. His breath — or her breath. It detects minute traces of hormonal components and other stress indicators, and . . . let's see . . . metabolized catecholamines that have passed through the blood-brain barrier. Real sophisticated stuff; you're talking about counting molecules one by one.'

  'Sophisticated, indeed. You're actually talking about detection and analysis procedures that would require a fully staffed laboratory twice the size of this chamber, and
with a turn-around time from sample collection to final read-out of somewhere between twenty-four and forty-eight hours, if you want to get anywhere close to ninety percent reliability.' Carsten raised an eyebrow. 'Anything less than that kind of set-up, and the reliability falls to about the fifty percent line. Or about what you could achieve by flipping a coin. Hardly seems accurate enough to kill somebody over, does it?'

  'Hey — did I make the rules?' The soft-pedaled accusation irritated Iris enough that she took her hands away from her body and spread them out in a mock plea for forgiveness. 'They told me the numbers to look for, and when those numbers came up somebody was toast Too bad for them, but that's the name of that game.'

  'More fool you, then. Because the design of the Voigt-Kampff machine isn't so much as to accomplish what they told you it was doing, but to make you believe that it was.' Carsten sounded smugly assured. 'If sampling the exhaled breath of a suspected replicant, even pulling the molecules right out of the air at a distance, was something that your testing procedure depended upon, it could be done a lot more thoroughly and effectively without some creaky eighteenth-century pump device doing the work. A sampling device using offthe-shelf parts wouldn't even be visible at all; the suspect wouldn't know that his exhalations were being analyzed, so there would be no test-related stress factors to deal with, and thus a greater chance of accuracy in the final results. So in fact, the design of the Voigt-Kampff machine ensures that whatever report it produces will have a considerably enhanced possibility of error, rather than less so.'

  'Take it up with the department, okay?' Iris shook her head wearily. 'As far as I'm concerned, the thing worked fine. It's not like I ever got a lot of complaints filed against me about any of the readings I took from it. None of the suspects I retired were ever found out later, when the coroner's office did the post-mortems, to have been actually human.'