Replicant night br-3

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  The real Rachael, or as much real as any replicant could be. Which as far as Deckard was concerned, was more real than the human original could be; even when Sarah had tried to pass herself off as Rachael, he had known the truth before she had slipped up, long before the emigrant ship had left Earth. That Rachael was already dead, and that Sarah could never be her, even though she was identical in every way but one. And that one thing wasn’t part of her, but was located inside him, so deep she could never reach it.

  “These are things you need to deal with, Deckard.”

  Batty’s words had broken the course of his thoughts; it took him a moment to adjust. “What things?”

  “If there’s still an operational conspiracy against the blade runners, then your ass is still on the line. You can’t hide. Your cover’s blown. Everybody knows where you are. How do you think Holden and I were able to track you down so easily?”

  “Big deal.” Deckard shrugged. “You had contacts. Probably with the video people—that Urbenton guy. When they had the video ready for release, they were planning on doing a whole publicity trip that they’d had me signed on as technical adviser during the taping. That’s what they were paying me for. My name. So it wasn’t going to be a secret for very long. Holden must’ve caught a leak from the production, that’s all.”

  “A couple of minutes ago,” the briefcase said dryly, “you were figuring that Holden must’ve still been working for the LAPD. You really think that the department gets its information from camera operators who can’t keep their mouths shut? Come on—you know they don’t work that way. Admit it-this has got all the smell of high-level spookiness.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No ‘maybe’ about it, Deckard.” Batty’s voice tightened, wirelike. “You know it already. Holden wasn’t LAPD, at least not when he showed up there at Outer Hollywood. He was as quit as you are. That’s why you took me when you left the station to come back to this rattrap. If you’d really thought that I was part of a police operation of any kind, you would’ve booted this fine-quality briefcase right out of the skiff’s waste chute somewhere in transit. I’d be talking to myself out in the cold, cold vacuum right now. At least until my batteries ran down.”

  He’s right, thought Deckard. That mind, with all of its mercenary hit man sharps, was still there, intact. Batty, boxed or not, could read right into his soul and see what was written there.

  “I was curious.” Deckard could hear his own flat, defensive words. “I just wanted to see what this whole game was about. That’s why I took you with me.”

  “Yeah, right. And risk having me turn out to be a homing device, so the authorities could track where you went as soon as you left the station? You could pull my other leg, if I had any.”

  “All right . . . all right.” For a long moment, Deckard remained silent, then reached for the glass. He held it to his mouth but didn’t drink, only inhaled the acrid fumes. Then he pushed the chair back and stood up, carrying the glass to the sink and pouring it out. The brown liquid sluiced through the scabbed dishes and down the reluctant drain.

  He couldn’t afford to go under the alcohol tide, not now. He’d brought something else back with him, besides the briefcase. Fear; the unease gnawing at his synapses, the twitch of rigid neck muscle and crawl of prickling skin, the mute awareness of something closing in on him, its teeth not yet revealed.

  That sense had begun rising along his spine as he’d looked down at the corpse of Dave Holden at his feet . . .

  “Go ahead,” Deckard said as he sat back down. He’d carried the briefcase here, hoping for answers. “I’ll accept that you’re not part of some police operation. So start talking. Who sent you?”

  “Who sent me?” The one-cornered smile returned to Batty’s voice. “Or who sent Holden?”

  “The two of you.” Deckard leaned back in the chair, legs sprawled under the table. “Together—your little buddy team. If it wasn’t LAPD . . . I can’t figure it being the U.N. Their security agencies wouldn’t bother tracking me down at the Outer Hollywood station. They’d nail me here. Everything on Mars is a U.N. operation, except for the cable monopoly, and they’re in each other’s pockets.”

  “Work on it, Deckard. Who else out there has got an interest in replicants and the people who go around hunting them down?”

  “The replicants themselves.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

  “The only problem with that theory,” said the briefcase, “is that replicants-escaped replicants, especially, on the run—they don’t have any resources. They’re just hiding out, staying low for as long as they can, trying to keep alive. What kind of operation could they put together? You think they could’ve managed to get me scraped off that freeway wall where you left me, get my cerebral contents transferred into this thing, and send Holden out to deliver me to you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You got that one right. But there are others, aren’t there? Others who are, shall we say, concerned about the replicants and what happens to them. Concerned in ways besides just wanting to kill them off. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, you ran into them yourself, back in L.A. You must have.”

  “All right, I know who you’re talking about.” Deckard gave a dismissive gesture with one hand. “The sympathizers. The rep-symps.” He shook his head.

  “You gotta be joking, Batty. That bunch of losers? Street corner evangelists tub thumpers.”

  “There’s more to them,” said Batty, “than just that.”

  “Sure-some of them are loose-cannon terrorists. Getting themselves blown away by the police—for what? For the sake of shooting down some obnoxious U.N. advertising blimp?” Deckard had seen that for himself when he’d been on the run in L.A.’s maze of streets. His first exposure to the rep-symp phenomenon; he’d heard more about them since then. “So these head cases can dig up a few military surplus mortar rounds and hit a floating viewscreen. I’m not impressed.”

  “Stop being such a dumb cop.” The voice turned harsher. “Get with the program, Deckard. The rep-symps you saw on the street—the screamers, the terrorists, the religious types out in the sideways zone-those are all the fringe elements. The fact that you see those people running around at all should’ve told you something. It should’ve been the tip-off that there would be others that you don’t see, ones whose brains aren’t cracked. Ones who’ve got their agenda going in a whole different way. You ran into one of those as well—that guy Isidore at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital.”

  “Yeah, I remember him. But he was a loner, a one-man operation—”

  “That’s what you think. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, use your head.” Disgust tinged Batty’s voice. “Isidore was working right in the center of L.A., disguising escaped replicants as humans-disguising them so well that your big-deal blade runner unit didn’t have a chance of catching them—and he was getting away with it. If your girlfriend Sarah Tyrell hadn’t sent her pet hit man out to take care of him, Isidore would still be in operation.”

  The girlfriend crack nettled Deckard, but he kept himself from rising to the bait. “That doesn’t prove Isidore wasn’t working alone. Or that he had some kind of high-level connections covering his ass.” Deckard shrugged. “Maybe he was just lucky—or at least he was until the end.”

  For a few seconds, the briefcase was silent; then it emitted a low, mocking fragment of laughter. “Come on, Deckard—there’s no such thing as luck. If something happens, it’s for a reason. If Isidore was getting away with disguising replicants as human, and he was doing it right in the face of the LAPD, you can bet he had some powerful friends on his side. People who’re just as concerned about what happens to escaped replicants as Isidore was.” Batty’s smile threaded through his voice again. “People . . . maybe . . . who are right there in the police department itself.”

  “They’d have to be.” Deckard wished he hadn’t poured his drink into the sink; now he felt like he could use it. The way his old boss Bryant had used booze shots, both for himself a
nd anybody he’d brief in his shabby, dust-smelling office. To fuzz the edges of reality a bit, just enough to let new, spooky possibilities come sneaking into everyone’s cortex. “The repsymps, huh?”

  “You got it.” The voice emerged from the briefcase with a note of triumph.

  “The replicant sympathizers aren’t just a few isolated crackpots sparking off their remaining brain cells. They’ve penetrated every level of government-right into the police force itself. They may not be the only conspiracy going on, but the rep-symps are in there pitching.”

  “Something doesn’t add up.” Deckard laid one hand flat on the table. “The replicants who’ve managed to escape and get to Earth—if Isidore and his whole Van Nuys Pet Hospital operation, if it was so good at disguising replicants as human, so they couldn’t be detected even with Voigt-Kampff machines-why would it be just the rep-symps who are looking out for their interests? Why wouldn’t the replicants themselves be in on all these high-level conspiracies? If they can pass as human, they should be able to infiltrate the police department as well as anybody else.”

  “The replicants are in on the conspiracies.” Batty spoke with simple matter-of-factness. “The rep-symps—the important ones—and the replicants are in constant communication with each other. But not on Earth. There’s things going on in the outer colonies, out in the stars, that hardly anyone on Earth knows about—because the U.N. and the police don’t want them to know.”

  “Like what?” The hand, fingers spread, remained motionless on the table.

  “Rebellion. Slaves against masters. What else? History always repeats itself—it had to happen, given the way humans have treated the replicants out there.”

  “How bad is it? The rebellion, I mean. If there really is one going on.”

  “Depends upon whether you’re a replicant or a human colonist.” The smile in Batty’s voice turned even more unpleasant. “Let’s just say that the humans may have the guns, but the replicants—they’ve got the numbers.”

  Deckard found the last remark unimpressive. “Numbers don’t mean anything.

  Except the number of bullets needed.”

  “Come on,” chided the briefcase. “Why should you be so skeptical? You blind or something? Look around—you know what the situation is around here. You and all the rest of the would-be emigrants—you’re bottled up here like ants in a Mason jar. Why do you think no one’s been allowed to travel on and outward in the last half a dozen years? The U.N. just keeps stacking people up in these hovels, letting them go stim-crazy, eating themselves up out of sheer fucking boredom. The clamp’s on, the bottleneck’s there, because the U.N. can’t let emigrants go on to the outer colonies. The replicants control the territory.

  Otherwise, the U.N. would just go ahead and shoot you and all the rest of the wanna-be emigrants out there, let you take the consequences. Which would be death. And why would the U.N. care about that?” The briefcase’s voice indicated another invisible shrug. “The whole point of the emigration plan is to get people off Earth—if they wind up corpses in the process, that’s no big deal.”

  There would be another advantage, as well, that Deckard could see. We wouldn’t talk, he thought. Not if we were all dead. In that way, the replicants, the rebellion, would still be doing the U.N.’s work for it. Slaughtered emigrants wouldn’t be getting any word back to Earth, to families or strangers, about what had gone wrong with all the big plans for humanity’s future out in the stars. Better to have corpses littering the alien turf rather than disgruntled returnees coming back and letting everyone know that their promised slaves had gotten murderously uppity.

  “Figure it out.” The briefcase’s voice continued hectoring him. “If the U.N. could regain control of the outer colonies, then they could continue funneling emigrants to any destination they wanted, rather than letting them stack up here. But to do that, to get that control again, the U.N. would need to have its own off-world military problems squared away—and they can’t do that.

  They’re screwed; the U.N. depended too much on beefing up the ranks with replicant soldiers, like the ones for which they used me for the templant-Nexus-6 Roy Batty models, like that one you were assigned to track down in L.A. Only it just about wound up handing you your ass, didn’t it, Deckard?”

  The briefcase barked another quick, humorless laugh. “That’s the problem with the Tyrell Corporation’s having put out such a good product. Even if the Batty replicants aren’t quite as tough and smart as the human original-me, at least when I was still walking around inside a body—they’re still pretty mean customers. If the U.N. thought it could put together an off-world military force out of pieces like that, and there wouldn’t be a price to pay, they must’ve been dreaming.”

  Deckard slowly nodded; he could get behind that. Dreaming, he mused. That was what most of life had become, for himself and-apparently-everyone else. Lost in it, so that the difference between this world and any other was harder and harder to make out. For Sarah as well, thought Deckard. More for her, perhaps, than anyone else. He had sensed that a long time ago, in the decaying little cabin in the woods, the hiding place to which he and Rachael had fled; when he had seen Sarah look down at her replicant double-at Rachael sleeping in the black coffin of the transport module extending her rapidly dwindling life span—he had detected the envy radiated by Sarah as she had laid her hand on the cold glass, inches away from the mirror image of her own face. Envy of the sleeping, the dreaming, the dying; envy of the dead and the loved. So much so that Sarah had fallen into her own dreaming, a world in which she could at last become Rachael. The real, the original, trying to evolve into the unreal, the double, the shadow . . . the realer than real.

  And if somebody as smart, as survival-oriented as Sarah Tyrell could fall into the dreaming trap, then why not everybody else? Right up to the faceless scheming bureaucrats of the U.N.—Deckard couldn’t see why they should be immune. What a stupid idea, he thought, shaking his head. Create another race, smarter and stronger and possibly even meaner than human beings, then figure they’ll do just fine as slaves, tugging their forelocks and singing choruses of “Ol’ Man Ribber” in whatever cotton fields baked under alien suns. There weren’t enough bullets in enough blade runners’ guns to keep that kind of payback from working its way to Earth.

  “You know,” Deckard’s nod grew even slower and deeper. “I could almost believe all this.”

  “Why would a briefcase lie to you?” The inaudible shrug sounded again in Batty’s voice. “The condition I’m in, I’ve pretty much transcended all mortal desires.”

  “So tell me something else.” Deckard leaned the knots of his spine against the chair. Every muscle in his body had tensed. He felt the trap closing in on him—the sharp points of its teeth were just beginning to show. “Give me the rest of the spiel. The rep-symps—the real ones, not the head cases—they scraped your corpse off the freeway ruins, cracked your skull like a raw egg, and downloaded you into this thing. That’s about the size of it, right? That’s the line you’ve been giving me.”

  “You know it. First time anybody’s gotten this much of a handle on me.”

  “Big question.” Deckard studied the briefcase as though it had a face whose secrets he could read out. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “The rep-symps want you in a box, that’s their business. But why have Dave Holden bring you to me? What do I need you for?”

  “You don’t,” Batty’s voice replied coolly. “You’ve already shown how . . . proficient you are at engineering your own sorry fate. It’s the other way around; the rep-symps need you.”

  “To do what?” Deckard’s own voice went tight and harsh. “What’s the job?”

  “Simple,” said Batty. “They need you to deliver something. To the replicants.

  The insurgents.”

  “Yeah? Deliver what?”

  One word. “Me.”

  He’d been afraid it would be something like that. “Why,” Deckard asked wearily, “
would anybody want you delivered to them? Unless they were running short on novelty items.”

  “You’re a sarcastic sonuvabitch, Deckard. Believe me—“The voice coming from the briefcase turned darkly vehement. “If I could walk to where I needed to get to, I would. Rather than put up with your charming manner.”

  “Nothing says you have to.” Deckard shrugged. “There may not be any emigrants going to the outer colonies, but there’s still cargo shipments heading out of here. Tell you what—I’ll spring for the postage. Cover you with stamps, and you’re on your way.”

  “Unfortunately—” The briefcase emitted a snort of disgust. “You have to come along. You’re somewhat necessary to the whole operation.”

  “Why? What’s inside you?”

  “It’s not what’s inside me, Deckard. It’s what I am. The rep-symps back on Earth programmed more than just the contents of my skull into this box. They had other information they wanted to cram in here. Specifically, Isidore’s list.”

  Tilting his head, Deckard frowned. “What list?”

  “Come on.” The briefcase’s voice sounded impatient. “You didn’t have a whole lot of contact with Isidore back there at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, before Sarah Tyrell had him iced. He was a little bit on the fussy and meticulous side. He kept records.”

  “Records of what? How many mechanical cats he changed the batteries on?”

  “Get real, Deckard. A cop like you should be able to guess what. The escaped replicants, all the ones that made their way back to Earth and then went through the disguising process at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital—Isidore kept a list of every single one that he worked on, that he made capable of passing as fully human. And their new identities, the aliases that he came up with for them. Everything, all the info. Who they were, who they became, where they are—he kept it all.”