EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  No more voices spoke to her as she crossed the office, the columns' shadows falling past. And the voices inside her head -- those whispers had already started to die toward silence. The corner of her mouth lifted in a small indication pleased satisfaction.

  Past the bedchamber, Eldon Tyrell's private world, were the public spaces of his office. A larger space, acres of emptiness, designed to impress and intimidate. Sarah pushed the double doors open wider. Dust motes hung in the air between the bellied columns. The hot glare of the afternoon sun rolled toward her; a long-dormant sensor registered a human presence and considerately drew a polarizing filter down across the windows.

  Heel clicks louder here, echoing like miniature gun-shots. She had dressed for the occasion, as required by the invisible presences of money and power. That didn't expire when their earthly incarnations died; they demanded a certain respect.

  She walked past an empty T-shaped stand, the crossbar at the height of her shoulder. Her one kindness, when she had ordered the suite sealed off: one of the flunkies had reminded her about the owl, her myopic uncle's blinking totem animal. It would've starved to death or run down its batteries; she wasn't sure which. Somewhere else in the complex, it was now being fed or otherwise cared for. When she had prepared herself for the flight up north, she'd had a vague notion of taking the owl with her, releasing it in the restricted-access woods where her own quarry had taken refuge. She'd thought better of the idea; this animal, at least, was too tame or ill-programmed to survive out there. The forest crows would've disassembled its hollow bones. Whether it was real or not.

  She sat down at her uncle's desk -- hers now -- a Louis XIV six-legged bureau plat by Andre-Charles Boulle. She had barely been a teenager when the only other known six-legged bureau plat of that period, the one that had been owned by both Givenchy and Lord Ashburnham, had arrived at her uncle's suite in a crate full of wood splinters and sparkling fragments of brass and tortoiseshell marquetry. For Eldon Tyrell, it had not been enough to possess such a museum quality piece; he had to have the only one. The urge to take an ax to this desk had seized her from time to time. She'd resisted that urge so far, even though she knew, as she ran a hand across the richly polished surface, it was still there inside her. Sleeping, not dead.

  Sarah heard the doors open, the other ones, that led to the corridors outside the private suite. Looking up, she saw a figure walking slowly toward her. In the distance behind him, the doors pulled shut, but not before she caught a glimpse of Andersson, a gaze both suspicious and possessive on his face.

  "I've been here before." Deckard halted and looked around himself. A simple announcement. "A long time ago."

  Sarah leaned back in the chair. "It wasn't that long."

  "Seems like it." He didn't sound especially pleased, or even surprised. "Like some other world. Some other life."

  She stood up from the bureau plat. In the suite that had been her uncle's and was now hers, she walked across the layers of ancient Tabriz to the bar. "Would you care for something? I have it on good authority that you prefer the ones that taste like dirt."

  "The farther north," said Deckard, "the better. But anything'll do. I've gotten over being fussy."

  She handed him a small glass, its contents the same as the one she kept for herself. "Your health."

  "Wouldn't have thought you were concerned about it." He knocked back the shot in one toss. Every blade runner she'd ever seen drank in the same manner, as though trying to put out a small fire in the gut. "I was fine where you found me. L.A. doesn't agree with me nearly as well."

  She nodded slowly as she reflected upon his words. "So I suppose I'd better make you a pretty good offer. To compensate for your . . . inconvenience."

  He reached for the bottle and poured out another quarter inch. "I don't think you can. There wouldn't be one good enough."

  "Let's find out." She carried her glass back toward the bureau plat and sat down. She gestured toward the chair opposite. "Make yourself comfortable. We have a lot to talk about."

  He brought the single-malt bottle with him. "Such as?" He sank low and resentful in the chair, legs sprawled out in front of himself.

  "As I said, I want to make you an offer. A job offer. I want you to find someone for me. Some thing, actually. That's what you're good at, isn't it?"

  "I was at one time. I'm a little rusty now." He slowed his intake to a mere swallow. "Maybe you should hire somebody else. With current experience."

  "You're uniquely qualified." She let herself smile, one corner of her mouth lifting. "For what I want done."

  "There are other blade runners. Real ones. The kind who like doing it." Deckard rubbed his thumb across the rim of the glass. "There's an ex-partner of mine who's pretty sharp. Guy's name is Holden, Dave Holden. Give him a call -- he might be out of the hospital by now. He'd need the work more than I do -- he's probably got bills to pay."

  "That's very interesting. Your recommending this Holden person to me." She leaned back in her chair. "It's not the first time you've done that. Not to me . . . but to your old boss Bryant."

  "Maybe." Deckard shrugged. "I wouldn't remember."

  "Oh, I can prove it." She pulled open the bureau plat's drawer. Beside a small folding knife was a remote control box. She took it out; a single button push, and a section of the paneled wall retracted. "Take a look."

  Sarah didn't need to see what appeared on the video screen; she had seen it enough times already. Instead, she watched Deckard as he turned his gaze toward the dimly illuminated shapes, summoned from the tape and the past.

  She heard the voices.

  Give it to Holden. He's good.

  Deckard's voice. Then Bryant's.

  I did. He can breathe okay, as long as nobody unplugs him --

  With another button, she froze the tape and the images on the screen. "Now do you remember?"

  "How'd you get your hands on that?" He looked at her with a mixture of suspicion and grudging respect. "That's LAPD property. From the watchcams in Bryant's office."

  "As has been said before, there are ways. The relationship between the police and the Tyrell Corporation is not quite as antagonistic as some, people are likely to believe. Or at least, not all the time. There are some things that we an cooperate on. Or to put it another way -- I can always I Ind cooperative people inside the police department." Her thin smile didn't change. "People who can do things for me. Who can get me things. Like this."

  "I bet."

  "Would you like to see more?"

  He shook his head. "Not really. I didn't enjoy it that much the first time around."

  "Perhaps this time, you can take a more . . . detached point of view. Watch." With the remote, she backed the tape up. To the point where the image of Deckard was still standing just inside the office door.

  Bryant's recorded voice: I got four skin jobs walking the streets . . .

  "Did you get that?" Sarah froze the tape. "When Bryant gave you the assignment -- when he told you about this batch of escaped replicants being in L.A. -- what did he say, about how many there were?"

  "I don't . ." Deckard shrugged, as though annoyed. "I don't remember exactly what he said. But it was probably four. It had to have been. That's how many I went hunting."

  "Very well. So listen to what he told you a minute or so later." Another button, the tape fast-forwarding, then dropping into play. "Carefully."

  A different room on the monitor screen, but still one that she knew Deckard recognized. Both his image and Bryant's were in the little screening room behind the shabby office. Along with Bryant's bottle of scotch.

  Monitor within monitor -- on the tape, Bryant and Deckard were watching the recording from the interview Dave Holden had gone through with the replicant Kowalski at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters.

  I already had an IQ test this year . . . Close-up on Kowalski's slope-jawed face. I don't think I ever had one of these . . .

  "The data retrieval system's set to bring up whatever's the mos
t recent image of the subject." Sarah pointed to the screen. "Holden was the last one to get a good fix on Kowalski. Alive, that is." She brought up the volume. "Now catch what he told you, about how many replicants escaped from off-world and came to Earth."

  Bryant's rasp of a voice again. Six replicants . . . three male, three female . . .

  "Six." Deckard gazed in puzzlement at the screen. "Now I remember . . . he told me that there were six escaped replicants." He slowly shook his head, as though struggling to make sense of this remembered datum.

  "You're catching on." Sarah kept her own voice soft. "And then Bryant, on this tape, goes on to tell you about five replicants. One that he doesn't name, who got fried in the security barriers around the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, when they first tried to break in here. And then he showed you the pictures; he gave you the names and the rest of the data on the other replicants. You should find this interesting."

  She played the rest of the tape, the parade of faces, the ID scans on Bryant's monitor. A glance from the corner of her eye; Deckard was scowling at the screen, and the smaller one within it.

  "Do the count," said Sarah. She blanked the screen to a pure blue rectangle. She held her small fist up in front of it. "The dead replicant -- the one who got fried on the Tyrell Corporation's fence. That's one." Thumb stuck out. "Then Kowalski, the one who shot Holden. And then the females, the one named Pris, and the brunette Zhora. Plus the Roy Batty replicant." A finger for each, resulting in her hand lining spread out before the monitor's glow. "That makes five. Not six."

  The muscles across Deckard's shoulders had visibly tightened, at the mention of Roy Batty's name. The last of the escaped replicants; the one who'd nearly cost him his life. "Maybe . . . Bryant made a mistake. When he was first talking to me." Deckard made a dismissive gesture at the empty screen. "Five, six . . . who knows? Hell, the man drank like a fish. So he got his numbers messed up."

  "There were six," said Sarah quietly. "Bryant didn't mess up . . . at least, not then. There were six replicants who escaped and got to L.A.; the original transmission from the off-world security agencies -- I've got access to that as well -- confirms it. Plus, one of the times that Bryant pulled up the data bank file with the replicants' ID scans, that was so he could purge one of the sets. That was where he screwed up; he left a hole. The scans are in numerical order, as they were logged into the file. The one that got fried was never entered, since he wasn't a problem anymore. But the Kowalski replicant was number one in the file, then Batty was number two; the females Zhora and Iris were logged as numbers four and five. That leaves the gap in the middle, where the other replicant's ID scan and info used to be. Bryant wasn't smart enough to clean up the hole in the file, or he just didn't care."

  Sarah folded her arms across her breasts. "Do the count, Deckard. You take them all together, add them up, and the total comes out six. That means there's a sixth escaped replicant still on the loose. It's out there in the city. We just don't know where."

  "What if there is?" Deckard grimaced in annoyed distaste. "Why should I even care?"

  "Because that's what I'm going to make it worth your while to care about." The section of wall paneling slid closed again, concealing the video screen. She dropped the remote back into the bureau plat's drawer. "That's the whole point of your being here. That's why you were brought back to Los Angeles."

  "You know, you could be wasting your time completely. With me or anybody else." He regarded her with eyelids half lowered. "Bryant was a drunk and a screwup. He could've said six when he meant to say five. That's probably why I didn't make any big fuss about it, back then. I knew the way his sloppy brain worked. You could be getting all torqued about this sixth replicant when there was never one to begin with."

  "Except that the other information I have checks out. The report from the off-world authorities concerning the replicants' escape -- the report that Bryant had, but that you never saw -- it confirms that there were six total, who managed to reach Earth."

  "There's a report?" Deckard emitted a short, harsh laugh. "Then you don't have a problem. Access it and see who your sixth escaped replicant is. You don't need me to track it down."

  "Can't do that." She had anticipated every argument that he'd make. "I told you Bryant himself purged the data out of the police department files, even before he called you in and gave you the assignment. The ID info on the sixth replicant is gone."

  "Big deal. The LAPD can ask the off-world authorities to retransmit the escape report."

  "You don't seem to be getting it, Deckard." She leaned forward, across the bureau plat. "The LAPD doesn't know that there's a problem. The file on this incident was closed, the whole thing written off, finito, when the Roy Batty replicant was found dead. And I don't want the police to reopen the case. The Tyrell Corporation doesn't want them to."

  "Why not? You've supposedly got another Nexus-6 model running around the city. That can get very messy -- believe me, I know. I would've thought you'd want this loose end tied up as quickly as possible."

  "I do. The Tyrell Corporation does. But not by the police. I want all of the authorities completely out of the loop on this. The U.N. has already been giving us grief -- sub rosa, it of any media coverage -- about the wisdom of continuing to use the Tyrell Corporation's products, our replicants, in the off-world colonization' program. There have been problems . . . to say the least. Not just with the ones that've escaped and gotten back here to Earth. But out there as well."

  Deckard raised an eyebrow. "In my line of work -- what I used to do -- I got to the point that when people said problems, I heard death."

  "You don't need to hear the details." Voice level, cold. "If there's problems -- deaths -- then the U.N. and the off-world colonists brought it all upon themselves. They demanded a higher quality of slave labor. They want replicants that are closer and closer to actually being human, to having that level of intelligence. And emotion." Colder, and with contempt. "And not because it's any more efficient or productive than ordinary dumb robots would be. Our old Nexus-1 models were more than adequate for the task."

  "Then why?"

  "You blade runners really are like children. Murderous children." She gazed pityingly at him. "You can kill, but you don't understand. About human nature. Why would the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It's simple. Machines don't suffer. They aren't capable of it. A machine doesn't know when it's being raped. There's no power relationship between you and a machine. That's been the U.N.'s whole pitch about the attractions of the off-world colonies all along. The big human thrill. For a replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions." A corner of her lip curled. "When Bryant told you about the Nexus-6 models, he was conning you and he knew it. The replicants' emotions aren't a design flaw. The Tyrell Corporation put them there. Because that's what our customers wanted."

  "Sounds like they got more than they wanted."

  "They got exactly what they wanted; they just don't want to pay the price for it. Nobody ever does. The price for having slaves who can suffer is that eventually those slaves will rebel. Someday, somehow -- if they get the chance -- they'll put a knife to their masters' throats." She smiled, as one savoring the bleak wisdom of the universe. "Let's face it, Deckard, it's just human nature. And that's what we re-created with the Nexus-6 replicants. That's what the U.N. authorities, the ones in charge of the off-world colonies, have gotten into such a sweat about. Only they can't come right out and admit that they screwed up, that their entire for making the colonies attractive to potential settlers is a disaster, that it leads to garrison states, like ancient Sparta armed to the teeth against its own helots -- or else fields of bones on other planets, if the replicants manage to pull off a successful rebellion and the U.N. has to send in a military unit to sterilize the place, keep the infection from spreading. There's all kinds of things happening out there in the colonies that the authorities aren't tel
ling the people here on Earth. It wouldn't exactly make good recruiting propaganda, would it?"

  On the other side of the bureau plat, Deckard remained silent. She could almost see the slow meshing of gears be-to lid his eyes. "I think . . ." He stirred slightly in the heir. "I think I can guess where you're heading with this. You're going to tell me that the U.N. authorities and the police have gone in together. On a conspiracy to make it look like the problems with the replicants are the Tyrell Corporation's fault. And not theirs."

  "You're forgetting something, Deckard. It's not just a conspiracy against the Tyrell Corporation. It's a conspiracy against the blade runners as well. Or more accurately, a conspiracy using the blade runners. Using their deaths, that is. The U.N. authorities have to make it appear that the Nexus-6 replicants are even more dangerous than they really are, more capable of passing as human . . . and more capable of evading the system that was put into place to detect and eliminate them. That's you, Deckard, you and the other blade runners. What better way to make that happen than to set all of you up to take a fall, the way they set up Dave Holden? They'd just have to make it look as if the blade runners were no match against the Nexus-6 replicants, and they'd have all the justification they needed for shutting down the Tyrell Corporation. For good. No more corporation, no more replicants; the off-world colonies, the ones that are left, would have to find some other way of getting along."

  "Maybe." Deckard looked unimpressed. "Or at least until you figured out how to get the company back into business. Maybe with some other replicant model, one that wasn't quite so smart and dangerous."

  "Oh, no, it wouldn't work that way." This one as well, Sarah had anticipated. "If the Tyrell Corporation gets shut down -- the way its enemies would like to -- it won't be going back into business. Ever again. This whole complex . . .' She gestured toward the walls of the office suite and by extension, all of the headquarters buildings beyond. "For us to get a look on the U.N.'s business, to be the exclusive suppliers of replicants for the off-world colonies, this entire setup had to be built according to U.N. specifications. All the corporation's research and design facilities are here, along with the manufacturing units, every inch of the assembly lines that put out replicants ready to ship. Even the Tyrell family living quarters are here; that was part of the U.N. requirements as well. The shape of the buildings, the way they're arranged facing each other, everything. It was all done so that when the red button is pushed -- when the built-in self-destruct sequence is initiated -- the results are absolute annihilation to the Tyrell Corporation, with minimal damage to the surrounding area of the city."