Edge Of Human

7

Holden opened his eyes.

"Wait a minute." Not lying down, but sitting up. No black attache case, either gurgling or silent, strapped to his chest. Holden looked down at his own right hand prodding his sternum. A strip of navy-blue cloth dangled from his throat. "What the…" His voice louder now as well, almost deafening as it reverberated inside his skull. "What happened…

"I had to break into that storage locker downtown, that one where all your stuff got shoved when they cleaned out your old apartment." A now-familiar voice sounded from somewhere nearby. "Sorry about that. There might be somebody you could bill for the padlock I busted."

Holden looked over and saw Roy Batty sprawling with hands clasped behind his head, folding metal chair tilted back onto its rear legs. Watching him. He glanced down at himself again and saw that the strip of cloth was a necktie, one of his own good silk ones. The white shirt and grey suit, and everything else, were his as well. Stuff from another life, the one he'd lived before he'd gotten blown away at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Another life, another world.

"How you feeling? You feeling okay?" Batty had rocked forward in the metal chair. He examined a small remote control in one hand. "The doctors said these settings were about right, for your body weight and everything. You lost some muscle mass while you were flopped down in the hospital for so long. The works we implanted will automatically adjust for when you start getting back in shape. Probably give you a little more blood flow then, I guess."

Holden pushed the necktie aside and undid a couple of the shirt buttons. His bare chest was no longer an open, gutted wound; no tubes or hoses sticking out, either. An intricate map of scars and black stitches overlaid his pallid white skin.

"Don't go poking too much at those. They're not too fragile — I made 'em use the heavy-duty sutures — but you don't want to get them infected."

Holden traced his fingertip down one of the vertical lines. A dull twinge of pain, as though wired to tissue deep inside him. Plus either the faint sense or hallucination of muted ticking and sucking noises buried underneath the reconstructed flesh and bone.

"What's going on?" He looked up at Batty. "What's been done to me?"

"What, you worried about the bill or something? Jeez." Batty shook his head in amazement. "It's paid for, okay? You've been given a new lease on life, buddy. Free, gratis, por nada. So don't sweat it. Enjoy it, already."

"Implants…" He laid his hand fiat against his stitched chest, feeling against his palm the hum and surge of the machinery inside him. "A complete set… heart and lungs…" He took a deep breath, a last trace of spider-silk lifting from his brain. At the back of his throat was a taste of plastic and stainless steel.

"State of the art. None finer." Batty held up the remote. "I told the people here to use the best parts they could get None of those pulls they've taken out of other jobs and had sitting in a bucket somewhere."

"But they told me… at the hospital…" A tone of wonder in his voice. "They told me one time, when they brought me around, that they couldn't do implants. The damage was too great…"

"So? They lied to you. Simple."

Nothing cleared up by that. "Why would they lie? The doctors, and Bryant and everybody… it doesn't make sense."

Batty's smile rose, thin and all-knowing. "Makes sense… depending upon who you figure your friends are. Your real friends."

The spooky hint of conspiracy in Batty's voice set him thinking. "Could I see that?" He held out his hand for the remote control.

"Sure."

Only a couple of buttons on the device. "This switches everything off? Switches me off?" Holden didn't wait for an answer. He put the remote down on the floor and crushed it with his heel. A sound of splintering plastic and microchips, followed by a surge in his heartbeat, which then settled back down.

"Way to go!" Batty tilted his head back and laughed. The flimsy prefab walls trembled with his hilarity. "I'm sure they got another one of those things around here somewhere, but I admire your attitude. A couple, what, maybe four hours ago, you were at death's door… literally. That fuckin' hospital. Man, people go to places like that just to punch out. And they help you do it. Now here you are-" He gestured expansively toward Holden. "Feeling like your old self, I bet. Miracles of modern science. You got nothing to complain about."

Holden turned his head toward an uncurtained window. He'd seen that it was still dark outside, but he hadn't known what night this was, the same one in which Batty had snatched him out of the hospital, or one weeks or months later. "Your people here work fast." He looked back toward Batty.

"They're good at what they do. Get a lot of practice, I suppose."

Inside himself, he sensed the continuous operation of the bio-machines — the new parts of his body, the conglomeration of Teflon and inert alloys and efficient little motors that he'd absorbed, incorporated into the Dave Holden gestalt. He'd been raised from the dead. The suit and tie, the neat, machinelike precision of these outward manifestations, also part of that. He had been dead in the hospital, dead before he got there, dead as soon as he'd been a messy piece of meat bleeding around a smoking hole at its center. That weak, sloppy thing in the hospital bed, leaking fluids, pinned naked by plastic tubes and hoses-that hadn't been him, the real Dave Holden.

He spread his hands on his knees, studied as though for the first time. Like scalpels, he mused. Not just the hands, but everything about him. A cutting instrument, sterile out of the autoclave. Putting the blade in blade runner. Thatwas why he'd been so good at his job, at hunting down and retiring replicants: he'd out-machined them. He'd beaten out all the other blade runners as well, like that whiner Deckard; he'd gone all the way around the Curve and come out the other side. Come out as something… other than human. Until Kowalski..

"You still stewing about that? Getting blown away by some big moron?" Batty had read his thoughts, as though his eyes were gauges like those on the big machines he'd been hooked up to. "Get over it." Shrugged, smiling. "Or don't."

"No…" Holden slowly shook his head. "I'm just… wondering." He noticed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter sitting out on a table between them; whether they were Batty's or for him, he didn't know. "You mind?" He leaned forward and took the pack.

An expression of mild distaste. "You know you'll have to change your filter — the one inside you — twice as often, if you start that up again."

"It's worth it." He leaned back and exhaled, then studied the drift of blue smoke above him. The nicotine seeping into his machine-aerated blood made him feel even more efficient and confident, as though all the tiny valves inside had been fed drops of lubricating oil. His old self. "Definitely."

"Whatever." Batty's smile returned. "So what was it you were wondering?"

He knew he had to be cautious. The one more thing he would have liked to have had restored to him was his big black hammer of a weapon. He could see the bulge and the lopsided tug of weight inside the black leather jacket that indicated Batty was packing.

"Oh…" Holden glanced around at the buckling prefab walls. A collection of photos torn from magazines, nudes and tropical vistas, all equally unlikely, rustled in the hot dry wind seeping in through the seams. "You know. Like what the hell is this place?"

"Didn't you see the sign when they wheeled you in? It's the Reclamation Center."

"Never heard of it."

"Of course not," said Batty. "It wouldn't be a top-secret police installation if some schmuck like you knew about it."

"Looks to me like they're just pulling parts off some old trashed-out police vehicles." He tilted his head toward the window with its view of the wrecking yard beyond the fence. "What's so top secret about that?"

"Are you kidding?" Batty emitted a sharp barking laugh. "You know what happens to your appropriations money if the state or the feds find out you're recycling your rolling stock? Shit-they'll cut you off without a dime. Besides…" A shrug. "Keep something like this secret, makes it that much easier to keep the other stuff they do here under wraps. Stuff like cramming a nice new set of pumping gear inside you." He jabbed an index finger toward Holden. "You gotta admit, the folks out here have taken good care of you."

"The people at the hospital — where I was before — they were supposed to be taking care of me."

"That's true." Batty's smile grew wider, wicked with delight. "Like I said, a lot depends upon knowing who your real friends are."

He mulled that over for a moment. "It was the police department that put me in that ward. When I got shot…'

"Yeah, well, there's police… and then there's other police. You gotta cover your action, buddy, all around the table-if you're going to stay in this game."

Holden narrowed his gaze, studying the figure sitting opposite him. "Maybe so. What I'd like to know is… what kind of police have replicants working for them?"

A shake of the head. "None that I know of. That's not what police do. As a general rule, police are pretty much death on replicants."

"Then what're you doing here?"

"Huh?" Batty's smile faded. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Come on." Holden felt a little surge of excitement, a dangerous pulse. "Tell me — do these people here know that you're a replicant? Or have you pulled it off?"

"I'm a replicant?" Batty looked genuinely puzzled, eyes widening. Then he started laughing, uproariously this time, face reddening in bright contrast to his spiked crop of white hair, tears wetting the wrinkled corners of his eyelids. "That's good." He could barely get the words out. "That is… so good." The prefab walls rattled with his laughter.

"What's so funny?" All the hilarity was getting on Holden's nerves.

"That you'd think…" Batty pushed himself back in the chair with a hand against his chest, making a visible effort to sober himself up. "Sorry. It's that I just realized what you've been thinking. What must've been going around in your head all along, or at least since I showed up. You think I'm a replicant, right? A Roy Batty replicant." He wiped his eyes with his fingertips. "That's good. That's a really good one."

"Did you catch any of that action over on Alvarado? Where the blimp went down?"

Took a while for Deckard to respond to the question, the hard voice right beside him. He leaned back against the wall of the elevator as it crept toward the base of the building. "A little bit."

"I got called in, all the way over from Slauson. Another ten minutes and I would've been off-shift, and the dispatchers could've radioed to the moon for my ass." The cop spoke with no inflection, all traces of emotion drained from the process of communicating.

"Yeah, they like jerking you around." Deckard kept his own voice at that dead, menacing tone, the words coming out with that slow, reptilian ease they all cultivated. He knew that for his apparent age there should be more stripes on this uniform's sleeve. A fierce Darwinian attitude operated among the department's rank-and-file; they ate their own weaker members, to keep themselves lean and mean. Surviving some of the shit that happened down in the locker rooms was the hardest part of the job. If he was going to pull off penetrating the LAPD's central station, he'd have to give off the same ugly gamma rays that these guys did.

He risked a glance up to the level indicator above the elevator's doors. There was another twenty floors to go. He'd managed to flag a lift from a county jail spinner, the big grey bus with the barred windows, that'd been returning to the police department's Kwik-Justice Kourts for another load of plea-bargained felons. His disguise, the patrol uniform he'd stripped off the cop he'd left in the alley, seemed to sail right past the pilot and the guard. The card and pass code had gotten him from the landing deck and into the building. A spark of hope had ignited inside his chest that he'd be able to get into the station, past all the other cops crawling all over it. And get to Bryant.

That was the only plan he had. And the only hope. Of getting out of L.A. alive and getting back to Rachael, asleep in her black coffin. Guarded by owls and all the little nocturnal forest creatures, like an old fairy tale.

God knew that Bryant owed him a favor-or more accurately, a whole string of them, from all the times he'd carried the bucket for Bryant, the blade runner unit, and the whole LAPD by extension. He'd pulled everybody's cojones off the chopping block on more occasions than he could count.

On some invisible clock, the hands pointed to payback time for all that loyalty he'd shown Bryant. He just hoped that the police inspector could read it as well. All he needed was information; that didn't seem like much.

"If you asked me…" A voice broke into Deckard's thoughts. "I'd say we should kill them all."

Then who would sort them out? he wondered. He didn't know. He glanced over at the cop beside him in the elevator. For a few moments he'd gotten lost in his worried plotting. Not a good thing he knew he'd have to stay hyperalert if he was going to get in and out of this building.

The cop had relaxed, a bit of the anal-retentive steel going out of his spine; he rested his shoulder blades against the wall of the small space. Without taking off his glasses, he wearily rubbed his forehead with one black-gloved hand. A long shift, maybe a back-to-back. Calculating his overtime pay and brooding about whether it was worth the burnout.

Deckard almost felt sorry for the guy. At least with promoting to the blade runner unit, you got to set your own hours. This poor bastard wouldn't stand any chance of getting off patrol, if it got logged into his package, his personnel file, that he'd let a wanted man ride all the way down with him to the station's ground floor.

"Kill all who?" asked Deckard.

"Eh, those goddamn rep-symps." The cop's face set into a scowl. "They're so fond of friggin' replicants, then we should treat 'em the same way." He lifted his hand, stuck out his index finger to make a gun, then curled it into the invisible trigger. "Bam. Instant retirement."

The term rep-symp was a new one to Deckard. Replicant sympathizer? — that seemed the likeliest. Some new development, while he'd been gone from L.A.?

The cop was waiting for him to say something, to make conversation. "Yeah-" He nodded. "Crazy bastards."

"Crazy's not the word for it." The cop's mouth twisted with loathing. "Traitorous is more like it. They got their own species they belong to. If they don't like being human, they shouldn't wait for somebody like us to come around and solve their problems for them. They got guns-shit, they got heavy artillery. Let 'em all suck off some nine-millimeter rounds; then they won't be human anymore. They'll be hamburger."

Deckard kept his face stone, his eyes the only thing moving as he glanced up again at the level indicator. Only a few more floors to go-the elevator had started to slow, braking to its coming halt.

"Some of those things those rep-symps say…" The cop standing beside him had gone into a bitter monologue, the looped tape in his head running off its spool. "Where do they come up with that stuff? You heard what that one jerk was spouting off about, before he got plugged. What a load of crap."

The elevator came to a thumping stop, the doors sliding back.

"Take it easy." The cop pushed himself away from the back of the elevator. He didn't look back as he walked out onto the ground floor of the LAPD's central station.

Deckard gazed past the metal-framed opening in front of him and across the vaulted spaces beyond. The icy blue glow of the building's exterior security lights traced shadows through the towering windows, inscribing a crosshatch of lines along the arches' overhead crescents. At this level of the ancient train station onto which the police department's headquarters had been grafted, the air-conditioning was all retro-fit and inadequate. The spaces near the ornate ceiling shimmered with bottled-up heat; a fine mist hung below that, composed of equal parts cop sweat and the more rancid tang of perp fear.

He turned his head, scanning.

The station's ground floor was packed with cops, more than he ever remembered seeing here before. The black uniforms, the jackboots and peaked caps, gleamed like oiled chains. It took him a while to realize what was going on. He'd never been in the station, not since he'd worn a uniform, during shift change. Blade runners kept their appointments at the dead hours between.

He also knew, as he stood in the elevator's open booth of light, that every face out there, wearing silver over its eyes or not, would turn his way if he didn't move his ass. Even through the miasma locked in here, they'd smell their quarry, frozen in the dazzle of the cops' sight lines.

He stepped out of the elevator, pushing his way through the crowd. His black leather shoulders shoved against the others, his face the same hard mask as theirs.

Holden gazed hard at the creature sitting opposite him. Inside, confidence slightly shaken, he couldn't get a readout on this Roy Batty. Whatever his sixth sense whispered, his honed blade runner instinct, it was all fuzzy and indistinct. At the same time, he knew from experience that these escapees from the off-world colonies survived-or tried to-by playing mind games. "You're going to tell me you're not a replicant?"

"Something like that." Batty wasn't laughing anymore. "You've got it backward, fellow. When I told you I was Roy Batty, I didn't mean some creepy low-watt version of me. I meant me, period. I'm the real Roy Batty. The human one. I'm the… what's it called… the template-"

"Templant," corrected Holden. This was a possibility that hadn't even occurred to him. "That's the technical term."

"Yes… that's it. I'm the templant for that Roy Batty replicant that you and your buddies, you hotshot blade runners, were assigned to retire."

"That one…" Holden's voice went soft, meditative. "Bryant told me that one was dead."

"He was right about that, at least." Batty shook his head in disgust. "That sucker crapped out. Just died. The four-year life span the Tyrell Corporation built into their Nexus-6 models — that's four years under normal operating conditions. It's like buying a new spinner: you put any stress load on at all and your warranty's invalidated. You got a pile of dead meat on your hands, is what you got." His face set even grimmer. "You know, it's embarrassing to have a shoddy buncha products like that walking around with your face on them."

"Wait a minute. You're saying there's more than one?"

"Of course." Batty tilted his head to one side, studying Holden for a moment. "I've noticed this before, that you blade runners just aren't hip to the realities of modern industrial practices. Economics and stuff-I would've thought you'd know this, just to get a handle on what you're doing. The nature of the beast, so to speak.

"Of course there's more than one Roy Batty replicant. You think the Tyrell Corporation would tool up for a whole production run and then just make a single unit? Christ, they're probably making more of 'em right now. And shipping 'em off-world to the colonies, all packed away in their transport module boxes, like big of Ken dolls or something. I understand it was a pretty popular model-the Roy Batty replicant, I mean. Lot of orders came in for it." His face darkened to a scowl. "Not that you'd know it from the royalty statements that I get from the Tyrell Corporation. I tell you, man. That reserve against returns they hold back… it just gripes my ass."

Holden stayed silent for a moment, trying to get his thoughts started up again. He felt the emptiness of the desert's vast unpeopled spaces, just beyond the building's thin walls. Unfamiliar territory, a long way from the Los Angeles that he was used to moving around in. Same way with the stuff that Batty was telling him. "Let me get this straight. You get royalties?" The only question he could think of to ask. "On what? Your personality or something?"

"Hell, yes." Spine going rigid, Batty looked offended. "On my personality, my expertise-my experience. Everything I've got up here." He tapped his forehead. "I've got nearly half a century of smarts, what I was born with and what I developed the hard way; I went into this business when I was barely old enough to shave. And I got my ass handed to me, plenty of times, right off the bat. You become a mercenary, a military combat specialist, as young as I did, they're signing you up to be nothing but cannon fodder. You're a minimum-wage corpse, man." He folded his arms across his chest. "Some of these fuckin' replicants think they got it so bad; they ain't seen shit. I did some tours where the survival rate was one in twenty — Schweinfurt, Provo, Novaya Zemlya. Hell, at Caracas the rate was one in fifty. But I was that one." Setting his hands on his knees, he leaned forward, eyes radiant diamond points. "And you know why?"

Inside Holden, one of the bio-mechanical heart valves trembled. "Why?"

The thin edge of Batty's crazy smile appeared. "Because… part of my brain's wired in backward. I was born that way. Unique. Way inside." He gestured with a fingertip pressed above his ear, twisting it like a drill bit. "Neural malformation, calcium deposits on both the right and left amygdala. That's the brain structure that creates the emotional response of fear. Usually, people with this condition — it's pretty rare — they just don't feel fear. There's no physiological or emotional response. My head's better. The amygdalae are webbed through a whole batch of my major serotonin receptor sites. Situations that scare other people shitless — I get off on them. I like 'em." The corners of his smile lengthened, his eyes glittering. "Nothing can scare me. The more people try, the worse things get… the happier I am."

"Sounds handy."

"Yeah, well…" Batty shrugged, looking pleased with himself. "It's like with people who don't have pain responses-you know? They 'have to be real careful not to hurt themselves accidentally. There's no feedback for them to adjust their behavior. It took me a long time-most of my life-to develop an intellectual understanding of fear. Just so I could recognize it in other people's faces. And so I wouldn't go waltzing into situations where I'd be sure to get killed. But yeah, it's handy. Makes me a cold motherfucker. Just think what it'd be like if you chicken-hearted blade runners had heads built that way; you could really get some major damage done." His expression turned to pity. "As it is, it's why you guys don't have a chance against the Tyrell Corporation's Nexus-6 models… especially the Roy Batty replicant. All the Nexus-6 types have a little bit of this, but that model in particular — 'cause it's an exact copy of me — all of the Roy Batty replicants are in serious kick-ass mode. You guys are just lucky if one of them ups and dies on you. That's the only way you'd survive an encounter with a Roy Batty replicant."

The other's boasting irritated Holden. "That Batty replicant didn't run into me."

"Just as well, for your sake. You got iced by that Leon Kowalski model, and that thing's a goddamn moron by comparison. If you'd hit on the Roy Batty one, there wouldn't have been enough left of you to stick an artificial heart into."

"Maybe." Holden kept his own voice level and cold. "I wouldn't mind having the chance at one."

"You're not likely to get it. The Roy Batty replicant that was running around in L.A. was the only one that ever made it back to Earth. The UN. authorities know what a loose cannon one of them can be-I've worked for U.N. security, so they're hip to what a version of me is like-so they keep them under wraps or way out in the far colonies. How that one got close enough to make a break for Earth.. that was a screwup. Somebody wasn't paying attention."

"You're with the U.N.?" He was still trying to piece together what the deal was.

Batty shook his head. "Not right at the moment. And I never was officially hooked up with them. I was always more of a freelance operative, you might say. Mercenary. That's how I built up my rep. Then I hired on with the Tyrell Corporation-old Eldon Tyrell recruited me himself. That was because he wanted the best, and he could afford it."

The picture was starting to get a little clearer. "What did you do for the Tyrell Corporation?"

"Eh, some troubleshooting, some industrial strong-arm stuff-there were still a couple of other companies turning out replicants back then, and Eldon decided he didn't want the competition anymore. So they got… kind of eliminated. One way or another. And then I was on retainer for a coupla years, while they were checking me out in the corporation's labs. Doing the brain-scan thing-that's when they found out about the cross-wired amygdala. That was pretty much the kickoff for the Nexus-6 development program." Batty shrugged. "After the production line started rolling, I moved over to personal bodyguard stuff, covering old man Tyrell's ass."

He decided to risk a needle probe, just to see how Batty would react. "You must not have been doing a very good job. They told me in the hospital how Tyrell got killed."

"Not on my watch. I quit months before that went down. Man, I'd decided long before then that I wasn't going to work for those bastards anymore." Batty's face turned dark and brooding, gaze fixed on some inner vision. "I'm telling you-there's some sick people over there. Eldon Tyrell might've been the worst of them, but they're all fuckin' nuts. Some of the things I've seen…" He shook his head. "You know, there's a big red button over in the Tyrell Corporation headquarters-the U.N. made 'em put it in when the place was built. Just a little safeguard, in case some of the stuff they were dinking around with ever got out of hand." His voice twisted with bitter loathing. "I'd love to push that red button, and just stand back and watch the whole friggin' place come down. It's be just what those sonsofbitches deserve."

A few more notes were jotted down on the file Holden had begun assembling inside his skull. Whatever else this Batty might be following through on whoever else's orders he was executing-he had a personal agenda as well.

"Tell you what." The cigarette had been smoked down close to his knuckles while he'd been listening to Batty. He stubbed it out against the arm of the chair. "Suppose I accept for the time being this story you've been giving me. I'll accept-provisionally-that you're the templant for any Roy Batty replicants. That you're human."

"Oh, thanks." A wry smirk settled on Batty's face. "What, you want me to prove it to you? There's probably an old Voigt-Kampff machine sitting on a shelf out here. You could run an empathy test on me, if it'd make you feel better."

Holden shook his head. "I couldn't get any worthwhile results off somebody like you.

Too much of a professional gloss-you probably know all the questions and answers already. There's no baseline I could establish for your involuntary response times." He picked up the lighter and ran his thumb across its smooth plastic surface. "Don't sweat it; as I said, I'm accepting for the time being that you're human. Why not? The only problem is, that still doesn't explain much." He flicked the lighter and regarded Batty over the thin, wavering flame. "Such as-why'd you bust me out of the hospital? And why'd you bring me here?"

"Here's easy." Batty's hand gestured toward the building's walls. "I've got friends out here. I've had a long time to build up favors that people owe me-I cashed in a few to get you your new lungs. But actually, it works both ways. Not everybody in the LAPD is as dumb as you blade runners. There's some of them who'd like to know what the hell's going on. And that's what I'm helping them find out."

"'Going on-"' He snapped off the flame. "What're you talking about?"

"You haven't got a clue, do you?" The pitying gaze again. "Wake up and smell the synapses burning, Holden. How do you think you wound up getting blown away by that Kowalski replicant? I mean, other than by your being less than brilliant. And what do you think's been happening to all the other blade runners? You know how many of your pals have landed in the boneyard? Even before you did your stint in the hospital."

"I don't keep count of stuff like that." Holden shrugged. "It happens."

"Yeah, well, it's been happening a lot, buddy. The only smart one in your crew was that guy Deckard. At least he had the sense to take off before he could be set up to take a hit." He pointed his finger. "A hit like the one you took."

"Bullshit. I never took any hit. Kowalski got the drop on me, that's all."

"He got the drop on you, all right-in a secured area of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Hey, I know what the security measures are like over there; I was a consultant on most of them. Do you have any idea of how many metal detectors and alarm systems Kowalski would've had to pass through with that gun? It's impossible. Somebody had to have either passed him the gun in the secured area, right before you started to interview him, or they switched off the detectors. Either one of those things would've had to be done by somebody with clearance right up at the top level."

"That's guesswork." Holden shifted uneasily in the chair. "You have any proof?"

"Oh… bits and pieces." The smile radiated smug selfassurance. "You had a recorder running when you were giving the test to Kowalski. I've heard that tape-one of my pals in the department smuggled a copy out to me. Very dramatic… especially the part where you take it in the chest. But the best part isn't even anything you or the Kowalski replicant said. You can hear it in the background of the tape, from the p.a. voice: Attention… we have a B-1 security alert. Know what that means? That's the Tyrell Corporation's internal code for detected tampering with the security grid. All the time you were talking with Kowalski, the people over in the admin offices were running around, trying to figure out where the rip in the net was. Of course, by the time they did find out, you were lying on your back, wearing a hole a small dog could walk through."

"An alarm went off. Big deal." Holden shrugged. "If it'd meant anything-if it'd had some connection with my getting shot-the police would've checked it out."

"Sure. Unless the police were in on it already."

"Now," said Holden, "you're talking conspiracy. And this is where it all falls apart.

Because it would've been Inspector Bryant who handled any such investigation. And you know, I worked for Bryant a long time. I can assure you-he wouldn't take kindly to somebody setting up any of his men. Bryant's got a blade runner heart. Anybody screws with his operation, Bryant would bust 'em wide open." Holden leaned back in the chair. "That's something you could bank on."

Batty had listened, nodding slowly, his smile growing thin and subtle. "You know… you may not be a genius, Dave, but you got a persistent little mind. That's kinda admirable. I can do business with you." He stood up, winging his arms back to work out a kink in his spine. "Come on, I got something to show you." He gestured with one hand as he headed for the door. "Come on-you'll really get off on this."

Outside, Holden followed him across the bare, packed sand of the Reclamation Center compound. This far away from the city, the stars shot down hard pinpricks of diamond light, unobscured by any smoldering haze. The day's heat radiated up from the ground, as though the path led over buried coals.

"Right in here." Batty had stopped in front of what looked to be a shack made of corrugated steel, rust stains weeping from the fasteners along the seams. He fished a ring of keys from his jacket pocket and pulled a padlock open. "Don't be afraid of the dark."

Holding his hands out to either side, as though for balance, Holden stood waiting in the middle of the narrow space. A radiance bluer than the stars suddenly fell across him. He turned and spotted Batty silhouetted by a video monitor. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the rest of the gear mounting to the bare metal ceiling, monitors still unlit, racks of butch military electronics.

"Check this out." Batty flipped switches, adjusted dials. A blue spark zapped his fingertips. "Damn. I told them to put a humidifier in here…" An image swam into focus on the monitor. "Know what this is?"

"Of course." He recognized the log-on screen. "It's the LAPD data banks."

"Sure as shit. We got a direct trunk line into the system here, hard-wired cable fifty feet down, staggered repeater circuits. Can't get better picture quality inside the station. Now watch this." From the key ring, Batty took a plastic card with a hole punched in one corner, a magnetic strip down the side. He ran it through a slot reader. "Voila."

"Christ…" What he saw rocked Holden back on his heels. The access level had rolled back to a string of four zeroes. As far as he knew, the chief of police had a level of zero-zero-zero-one.

"Don't try to get this away from me." Batty snapped the card back onto the key ring. "It's coded to my sweat genotype."

He watched as Batty voice-commanded through one directory branch after another. The guy seemed to know what he was doing.

"Here's what I wanted you to see."

ID scans, stocking-capped heads going through 360-degree rotations. First, the Roy Batty replicant, then a young blond, strange-looking woman, then an older-looking brunette. Then Kowalski; an involuntary flinch response went off in Holden's gut. Beneath each scan were lines of information, sub-type classifications and the like.

"So?" Holden glanced away from the screen, over toward Batty. "The department's keeping its files updated. What did you expect them to be doing?"

"You're not tracking, pal." With his fingernail, Batty tapped the corner of the screen.

"Look at the date. That's when this information-including the photo scans-was logged into the system." Smile. "Take a good look."

He sighed. "If it makes you happy…" Holden looked at the monitor again.

Simple digits. 2019 for the year, last year; 24 for the day. And in between those, 10 for the month. That'd make it, thought Holden, a week before Halloween. That seemed appropriate. Old pagan holiday, trick or treat…

"October," he said aloud. The realization came to him, perfect and clear. "This information was in the system in October."

"That's right." Nothing funny in Batty's thin smile. "And Bryant sent you out to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters the first week of November 2019. He sent you out there, without showing you these ID scans."

"He told me…" As though from a distance, Holden heard his own voice, barely audible.

"He told me that there weren't any scans or photos of the escaped replicants. He told me that the off-world authorities didn't have any

… that the data couldn't be sent… something like that. And I'd have to go out there with the Voigt-Kampff machine and run the empathy tests on all of Tyrell's new employees… to find which ones were the replicants…

"Look at the access record." Batty called up another screen. His finger tapped the glass again. "Bryant pulled these scan files out of the police department data banks three times before he gave you the assignment. He even printed out hard copies. The photos of the escaped replicants-by which you would've been able to recognize them without running any tests-were probably sitting in one of his desk drawers the whole time, the last time he talked to you in his office."

"But that would mean…" The pieces had linked up inside his head. It just took time to speak of them. "But that would mean Bryant sent me out there… to the Tyrell headquarters… to get killed."

"Figure it out." Batty laid a hand on Holden's shoulder. His voice soft, almost kind. "If you were putting together a conspiracy to eliminate the blade runners-for whatever reason-who'd be better for it than the man in charge of them?"

A tiny glimmer of light shone inside his skull. As Holden turned his gaze back toward the pure, empty glow of the monitor, he thought he'd started to understand.

And a joy as pure flooded his soul.

A smaller space, its own little world. As familiar to Deckard as the one he'd just walked across.

With its own smells, even its own dust, residue of time past. Deckard closed the door behind himself. Through the glass pane, with Bryant's name showing in reverse on it, the fragmented light of the station's ground floor folded shadows across the desk and the file cabinets.

He stood motionless, scoping out the room's darkness. Nobody had recognized him, stopped him as he'd made his way here from the bank of elevators. The virtue of machines, at least on this occasion, was their anonymity.

The blinds over the office's windows kept anyone from seeing him in here, while still leaking through enough light for him to gradually make out the rat's-nest clutter with which the space was stuffed.

"Bryant?" Keeping his voice low, he stepped into the center of the room. When he'd found the door unlocked, and had been able to slide right in with just a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one had been watching, he'd expected to find his old boss in here. Even though the desk lamp was switched off-he knew that Bryant often did his deepest brooding with the lights out and the scotch bottle close at hand. The inspector had been keeping night hours for so long that his skin, beneath his slob stubble and alcohol flush, was as pallid as a cave fish or a corpse. "You in here?" Deckard took another step closer to the desk.

A blue glow fell across him. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he saw the blunt rectangle of a video monitor in front of him, the screen at the height where Bryant's face should have been. A short-legged tripod, monitor fastened to its top plate, sat in the chair behind the desk, a set of cables dangling from it and looped snakelike into a wall socket behind.

"Hiya, pal." Bryant's jowly visage came into focus on the screen. His small eyes glinted through the low-rez mesh of a video transmission. "Good to see you again." Even in black-and-white, his smile's yellow-stained teeth were still apparent. "Thanks for stopping by."

"What the hell's going on?" Deckard spotted a small video-cam on the desktop, geared to a motorized tracking pivot. A red dot from the device had fastened onto his chest; when he moved to one side, the camera followed his motion, keeping him in sight. "What's all this for?"

"It's a friggin' pain in the butt, is what it is." As though the monitor were a tiny room in which he was trapped, Bryant leaned forward, short-sleeved elbows resting on a desktop somewhere else. The camera tracking him took a moment to refocus. "I'm in quarantine. Caught a bug-or at least I got exposed to one. One of those new jobbies that keep coming up from Belize." His wheezing voice came from a small intercom speaker on his desk. "I made the jackass mistake of helping make a collar in the flop palace behind my apartment building-hell, I was off-duty and everything. Supposed to've been catching my sleep rather than wrestling some disease-ridden, spickety wog bastard to the ground, like I was some young pup. Next thing you know, I got the department medics telling me there's antibodies the size of Buicks cruising my bloodstream." One of his big, hair-backed hands gestured toward the screen. "Hey, make yourself comfortable. Have a seat."

Deckard pulled up the other chair and sat down, scanning through the narrow spaces between the blinds' slats; nobody outside appeared to have noticed anything going on in the office. He pushed the chair back a couple of inches, to avoid the monitor's glow washing across him. "I guess you heard I was in town."

"I heard. News travels fast in a place like this. I mean, the docs got me stuck over here in the infirmary, doing everything by remote, and I still knew about it."

He peered closer at the image on the screen. "Are you going to be all right?" Even in person, it would've been hard to determine if Bryant was well, sick, or dying. "You going to live through whatever this is?"

"Hell, yes." Bryant shook his head. "Don't worry about me, pal. You're the one with his ass in a sling. Me, they've got so pumped with wonder drugs I could crap a pharmacy. They'll probably be letting me loose in a day or two."

"Because I need you up and running. You owe me big time, Bryant." He spoke softly, urgently, aware of the footsteps and barely muffled voices of the cops walking by, just beyond the office's thin walls. "I bailed you out plenty of times. Now you gotta do it for me."

"Well, well, well. What an interesting development." A sadistic delight radiated from the face on the monitor screen. "And I thought you were the guy who was all through with the blade runner unit. You gave the impression that you didn't like us anymore. Hurt my feelings, Deckard. Just about broke my heart-you were the best man on the squad. You always were. And then for you to just walk out on us, like you didn't even care…" The intercom speaker transmitted the sound of Bryant sucking his breath in through his discolored teeth. "Especially this last time. You walked a long ways, pal; I didn't expect to ever see you around these parts again."

"If it'd been up to me, you wouldn't have."

"That attitude's not winning any points with me. You want us to be friends again, then you should start acting friendly. Then maybe I'd feel like helping you out." Bryant reached off camera, his hand returning with a bottle and an empty glass. "Let's be friends." He poured out a shot. "Come on, you know I've got some of the good stuff there. And I hate to drink alone."

He felt his brow dampening with sweat, the chair arms slick under his palms. Jerking me around, thought Deckard, anger stifled to a heated rock in his chest. Exactly the kind of little games Bryant had always liked to play. He didn't have any choice but to go along. Sitting on the corner of the desk was another bottle, the duplicate of the one Bryant had in his quarantine chamber, and a pair of glasses. One was still clean; he poured a brown finger and knocked back half of it. "There. Satisfied?" The alcohol burned along his throat. Bryant's notion of the good stuff was anything you could set a match to.

"All right, all right; jeez. Prickly bastard." Bryant set his own empty glass down, his face heavy and brooding. "With the kind of enemies you got, you should cultivate your friends more. You could use 'em." He poured another shot, swirled it around in the glass, watching. "Fact of the matter is, I don't have a clue as to why anybody would want to haul your sorry ass back here. I sure didn't have anything to do with it." He took a sip. "And why the Tyrell Corporation's got such an interest in you… I mean, after your having screwed up and letting Eldon Tyrell get killed… it beats me. I've given up trying to figure out those people." Another. "Now the way I see it-"

"For Christ's sake, Bryant!" Deckard's nerve and his voice cracked. "I don't have time for this. Now, are you going to help me out? Or are you just going to sit there in whatever plastic bubble they got you in, getting soused and mumbling to yourself?" His anger rose, even while he kept his voice down to a tense whisper. "Because I'm not going to stick around here, listening to your bullshit. Not while every cop in the city is parading by your office door."

"Simmer down." Bryant knocked back the dregs. "I'll help you. I always have. Not that you ever seemed to appreciate it."

"I didn't appreciate getting jerked around by you. Back when I came to work for you again. What's all this about there being one more escaped replicant on the loose? A sixth one."

Bryant displayed his ugly smile. "Is that what the Tyrell Corporation's got you hunting for?"

"So it's true, then." Deckard leaned forward. "There is another one. And you didn't want me to know about it. What was that all about?"

"Look, uh… that's not important." On the monitor screen, Bryant's image shifted uncomfortably. "Like you said, you don't have time for screwing around. Why don't we just say that back then… I miscounted, or something. Things didn't work out quite the way I wanted them to."

"All right — Deckard could hear the tension and anger in his own voice. "Whatever the game was that you were playing, I don't need to hear about it. Right now, I need something from you. You either get me a spinner, fueled and with all clearances, so I can get the hell out of L.A.=

"Can't do it, pal." Bryant's image shook its head. "I can't put in a transport requisition from where I'm sitting."

"Fine. Then you call up the data that you purged out of the files-the stuff about that other escaped replicant. ID scan, name, description, the works."

"That's kinda hard, too. I put all that in a secured file sector. Got some tight locks on it."

"But it's there, right?" Deckard managed to keep his voice low. "So you can get it out.

And that's what I need from you. Give me the data on the sixth replicant, and I'll take care of the rest."

Another shake of the image's head. "Hunting it down won't be a picnic. Not with the whole LAPD on your case."

"Let me worry about that. All I have to do is turn its carcass over to the Tyrell Corporation, and then I'll be long gone. Again. The police won't even see my dust."

"You trust Tyrell?"

"I don't have any choice." He slumped down in the chair, splaying the glossy jackboots out in front of himself. Letting some of the anger drain away-he lifted the shot he'd poured out and finished it off. "They're the only chance I have." In the office's stillness, he heard the faint rumble of the rep train rolling through its dark tunnels beneath the station. The poor bastards aboard it had already found their way out. The noise faded away, like a minor seismic echo. An old, recognizable feeling crawled across his skin, the same one he'd felt whenever he'd been in Bryant's office before, and that sub-audible note had whispered at the edge of his perception. Evoking the same thought as before: At least I always killed them one at a time. His only source of moral justification…

Deckard shook off the creepy meditation. He didn't have time for that, not now. "So what's going to be? Do I get the info?"

"It'll take a while," said Bryant's image on the monitor screen.

"How long?"

The image shrugged. "Maybe half an hour. Maybe a little less. Especially if we don't have anybody noticing that I'm pulling the file back up. Once I've got it accessed, though, I can send it straight to where you're at right now. So the best thing for you to do…" The brown-toothed smile again. "Would be to just hang tight and wait for the pretty pictures to show up on the screen."

Deckard glanced at the office's door. He'd heard footsteps go by, then silence.

The voice from the monitor continued. "Like you said, pal, every cop in the city is walking by your elbow right now. None of them are likely to come waltzing into my office anytime soon. Keep your head down, and you should be able to hang out there until the crowd thins out a bitmaybe when the sun comes up and they all scurry to their little holes. Then you should be able to sneak back out." The image shrugged. "After that, it'll all be up to you. Just like you wanted."

The muscles along Deckard's shoulders eased. He could handle that. He'd gotten in here; he could get out again. And after that? He'd worry about it later.

"All right." He nodded. "The sun comes up, and I'm out of here." He swallowed the remainder in his glass. "You're the one who's going to have to take the heat, though. If it gets found out that you helped me."

"Let me worry about that." Bryant's image sneered. "These pussies in the department have been on my case for years. What're they going to do, fire me? Bring me up on charges? They can't-I'm the only one who'll do this rotten job for them, and they know it. Besides, I've got a file up here-" On the monitor screen the jowly, unshaven image tapped the side of its head. "With a list of where all the bodies are buried. There's a bunch the brass around here wouldn't like to see dug up. If anybody over at Internal Affairs or the police chief's office want to dick around with me, I can guarantee 'em it won't be just my funeral they'll be getting ready for."

The scotch radiated a feeble glow in Deckard's stomach. "It won't be just the department brass you'll have to worry about. Those enemies of mine that you were talking about-they won't be friends of yours."

"Yeah, like I'm so scared, pal. The fact that they were able to get you into hot water doesn't make 'em God. I've been covering my fat white butt for a long time now. Since I'm still alive, you might guess that I've gotten pretty good at it. And you'd be right. Like I said, let me worry about it."

He managed one corner of a smile for his old boss. "No choice, huh?"

"No choice." On the monitor screen, on the other side of the desk, hung the image of Bryant's own lopsided smile, the video image of his face slowly nodding. "You came around here asking for my help, now you gotta take. It's out of your hands, pal." The image drew back, one of its hands reaching for the bottle on the desk in the quarantine chamber. "Besides, even if they can get to me, what the hell do I care. I'm an old man, Deckard. At least I feel like one. Liver probably looks like a wet rag by now, plus I got an ulcer I could put my fist through, do sock puppet shows inside my stomach. if I wanted. I get plugged, so be it." He poured himself a taller drink than before. "Besides, I do owe it to you." The image gazed, eyes half-lidded, into the unlit depths of the glass. "You always came through for me, Deckard. Even when I had to lean on you. When I hauled you in here to take care of that last batch of escaped replieants.. "

"What?" All the joints of his spine tightened at once, as though the cord running through them had been yanked by an unseen fist. Something's wrong-the thinking part of his brain raced to catch up with the instinct, the quick sense that had made it possible for him to be a blade runner.

On the monitor screen the image of Bryant didn't seem to have heard him. The image went on talking, as though Bryant had started to drift into some private reverie.

"I knew that bunch was going to be trouble. Escaped replieants always are, but those Nexus-6 jobs had me sweating… "

That's not Bryant. He knew; he realized that a fake had been switched in on him. The sweat on his arms chilled, beneath the uniform's black sleeves. His old boss wasn't in a quarantine chamber somewhere else; the image on the monitor screen was a persynth, a CGI physiognomen, composited from the hundreds of hours of tapes recorded by the office's watchcams. A real-time response driver, with a branching script protocol, had been spouting the words in Bryant's data-sampled voice. A trap like this indicated a high-priority resource drain on the department; to get one of these ersatz personas up and running without detectable processor lag required mega-crag paralleled hardware.

One mistake had tripped them up, made it clear to Deckard what the deal was. Bryant wouldn't have said that — he'd heard the inspector spouting off enough times to be familiar with his crude vocabulary. Especially when he'd been drinking, which had been most of the time; whenever Bryant had started into bad-mouthing replieants, instead of just giving one of his squad necessary tracking info, he'd used the words skin jobs, his favorite ugly phrase. Whoever had wired up the physiognomen on the monitor screen had forgotten to cut out the PC loop imbedded in the police department's main computers, the language-scrubbing circuit that kept the LAPD spokesmen from inadvertently broadcasting some of their less attractive public-relations gaffes. The city's taxpayers didn't mind having a kick-ass retro-Gates police force, as long as it talked kinder and gentler.

The whole analysis ran through Deckard's head in less than a second. They're trying to pump me, he thought. That was why the trap was being allowed to run on, without him being pounced on immediately-the department authorities who'd set this up hoping to get some kind of info from him while he was liquored up and reminiscing about old times with Bryant's video simulation, lulled into a false sense of security. They're watching me right now — which meant they may have caught his involuntary reaction, the jerk upward of his head and stiffening of his spine that would signal his perception of something being amiss. Which meant…

His gaze shot to one side. Through the blinds over the office's windows, he saw that a wide swath of the station's ground floor had been cleared. A dozen LAPD elites, guns drawn, were running toward him, a few strides and seconds away.

"Hey! Where you going?" The synthesized image of Inspector Bryant looked puzzled as Deckard jumped from his chair. "What's the deal, pal-" Papers scattered in a white flurry as Deckard grabbed the top of the heavy file cabinet and heaved it over onto its side with a crash of splintering wood. Just in time-the first of the squad hit the door with a body-armored shoulder. The impact of the door's edge against the impromptu barricade knocked the cop back against the others behind him.

Deckard heard the elites' shouts and curses as he vaulted over the desk, knocking the monitor and its tripod aside. Bryant's synthesized image disappeared, replaced by a quick burst of static, then a solid glare of light spilling across the floor. In that blue glow, he caught a glimpse of what had happened to the real Bryant: an amorphous island of blood, dried into a dark stain, covered the space behind the desk.

He pushed himself up on hands and knees from the evidence of Bryant's death, as the windows along the side of the office shattered in fire and bright splinters of glass, the blinds flapping like metal-feathered wings, tearing loose from their mounts as a horizontal rain of bullets scoured the opposite wall. The office's contents-the row of other cabinets topped with ancient teardrop-bladed fans and routing bins of yellowed papers and dog-eared manila folders, the desk lamp inset with snaps of Bryant's father's biggame hunting expeditions exploded into sharp-edged fragments, the smaller pieces twisting in the vortex of the bullet's overlapping trajectories.

The deafening noise covered his actions. Deckard lifted above his head the overturned chair on which the video tripod had been mounted, and hurled it toward the single unbroken window that looked out to the police station's cavernous space. The shards of glass sprayed outward, the chair tangling in the cords of the blind, then tearing it loose and trailing the metal slats to the floor. He followed after, keeping low beneath the continuing gunfire, pushing off from the windowsill's jagged edge. He landed shoulder-first among the bits of glass, then rolling onto his back and drawing the gun from the uniform's holster with both hands.

"There he is!" one of the cops shouted over the din, pointing. Deckard's shot caught him in the chest, knocking him back with arms flung wide against the others stationed a couple of yards outside the office's door. A burst of assault-rifle fire raked the floor as Deckard spun away; he came up with his own gun aimed and another round squeezed off.

He heard the rifle clatter onto the floor, but didn't stop to look over his shoulder as he scrambled to his feet. The curved-ceiling stairs leading down to the basement levels were a few yards away; bare fluorescent tubes bounced a sickly illumination from the cracked white tiles. He sprinted toward the arched opening.

More shots sounded behind him, but he'd already reached the stairs; he grabbed the rusting metal rail and used it to sling himself hard against the wall. He leaned out far enough to brush his pursuers back with another couple of shots. Then turned and ran, taking the steps three at a time, a barely controlled fall toward the depths beneath the police station.