K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

"Oh, sure. Real nuh-nice. In his will… he left me the puh-pet hospital." He brought his gaze back down to Deckard's. "He left me.. everything. Really." The swivel chair seemed to have grown larger, as though it were capable of swallowing him up, as he folded his hands in his lap. "It's a big responsibility."

"What is? Giving distemper shots? Lube job on a replica Pekingese, maybe. Doesn't seem like anything you couldn't handle."

"Thuh-that's what I used to think. There wasn't any thuh-thing more to the job than that.

Even when old Mr. Sloat was still uh-uh-live and I was working for him. That's what I thought the Van Nuys Pet Hospital's buh-business was. Like you said — shu-shots and ruh-ruh-pairs."

"So if it's not that…" Deckard set the plaque down on the desk's corner. "Then what is it?"

"Well… you'd probably say we duh-deal in fuh-fakes. Like out in the souk. Fuh-phony goldfish, and kuh-kuh-cats and dogs and stuff. That you can't tell from the real thing. I mean… the living thing. What yuh-you'd call the living thing."

"Don't you? I thought that's where the money is. That's what people like. The fakes. The real ones… they just make a mess. It's just easier dealing with the simulations."

The other nodded slowly, wisps of silky white hair drifting over his pink scalp. "I guess that's what somebody who spent so much time as a buh-blade runner wuh-would think. You had your own wuh-way of dealing with those… suh-suh-simulations. Didn't you?"

He studied the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "Look — is this why I was brought here? So you could rag on my moral condition, or something? You needn't have bothered." He put his hands against the chair's arms, as though he were about to push himself upright and walk out of the office. "You know so much about blade runners… you ever hear of something they call the Curve?"

"Maybe." Isidore shrugged, nervous. "Some kind of… kuh-cop tuh-talk."

"The Wambaugh Curve." Strange to be talking about it out loud. It'd always been something that everyone in the LAPD knew about, could feel sitting under the breastbone like a ball of lead, but never spoke of. Another ticket to the department shrinks; where if they found you were too badly screwed up, they'd take away your gun and the answer to all your problems. "The index of self-loathing. Blade runners get it worse, and faster, than other cops. Comes with the territory."

Isidore's eyes looked wet and sympathetic behind the glasses. "Then what happens?"

"Depends." Once the dissection had begun, it was easy to sink the scalpel in deeper. "Upon where you are on the Curve." He'd used to think about these matters late at night in his flat, sunk deep in the overstuffed leather couch, one of the pleasantly expensive things that his bounty money had brought him. In the lonely splendor that'd followed his divorce, with a bottle of twenty-five-year-old single malt from the Orkney Islands close at hand, that sweetly tasted of smoke and dirt and money as well. Nobody ever said that blade-running sucked on the paycheck scale. Sometimes he'd sat there, brooding or anesthetized, with replicant blood still spattered across his chest. One time, he'd lifted his glass and had seen the drops of red written across the back of his hand. And had sipped and closed his eyes, and not felt a thing. "Eventually… the Curve gets steep enough, you fall off. I did."

"And then you weren't a blade runner anymore."

Seconds passed before he could say anything. "No… He shook his head. "I guess I wasn't."

"Too buh-bad." Steel under Isidore's voice, a thin needle of it. "A little late, for all the ones you killed."

Deckard gave him a hard stare. "Listen, pal-" A weapon in the eyes. "I was just doing my job."

"I knew you'd say that." No flinch, no stammer. "It's what they all say. All the murderers."

The cop on guard duty actually lifted his rifle across his chest. The next move would bring it down into firing position, full auto rock 'n' roll. "You got security clearance for this floor?" A mean look underneath the SWAT team cap.

"Hey, hey… don't sweat it, man." The figure in the hospital's green scrubs raised his empty hands. An easy smile, but cold eyes. "I hit the wrong button, got off on the wrong floor. That's all." He slowly lowered his hands. "No need to uncork the artillery, pal."

"Wrong button, huh?" The guard kept his finger on the trigger. At this range, he didn't need the sharpshooter tags under the LAPD shoulder insignia. He could've set the muzzle's hollow eye right on the breastbone beneath the hospital staff outfit. "Well, why don't you turn around, get back into the elevator, and push the right button this time. That way, you won't get into trouble."

"What's the deal, anyway?" The smiling man raised up on his toes, scanning over the guard's head to the open unit where the floor's sole patient lay surrounded by gurgling machines, a half-dozen doctors and nurses who seemed to be more like technicians and electronics geeks. Softly bleeping dots drew spiked trails on a bank of video monitors. "This guy some kind of VIP?" Beyond the bed and the body, windows reached to the ceiling, overlooking the city. "Been here a long time, hasn't he?" The magmalike L.A. sun battered the towers, the glare washing out the viewscreen of the U.N. blimp as it cruised by, making its constant pitch for off-world emigration.

"You ask a lot of questions." Cool enough to show nothing more than his index finger tightening on the crook of metal; small shiny things clicked ready inside the rifle. "Not a good idea."

"Peace, brother." Hands went up again, palms exposed, the smile floating between them. "You keep on doing your job, and I'll go do mine." Inside the man's skull, behind the cold eyes, a single unvoiced word: Jerk. A couple meters beyond the guard stood the open frame of a metal detector; he could see that it'd been switched off, probably to keep it from being triggered by the equipment carts that rolled in and out of the unit. It wouldn't have mattered to him if he'd had to step through the thing, still smiling, to find out what he needed to know; the small, efficient gun hidden at the small of his back was sheathed in enough microprocessor-controlled evasion polymers to slip past a goddamn radar station. It was the lazy unprofessionalism that irked him. These putzes were amateurs, all black-leather and chrome-eyed swagger, and sloppy on the details. Typical.

He reached behind himself and hit the elevator call button. Already there; the doors slid open and he stepped back, hands still up for a joke, the smile still on his face. He gave a little wave through the narrowing slit. "'Bye now."

Leaning back as the elevator descended, he let the smile creep up into his eyes. Behind them were no words, just a map, the exact layout of the unit, the guards, the machines and doctors, and the man on the hospital bed, who had a hole where his heart and lungs used to be.

He got off on the next floor down. No guards on this floor; he collected his gear, bigger and more rawly industrial-looking than the hospital's usual chrome equipment carts, from an unused storage closet and wheeled it into the maternity ward. He began unfolding the heavy bracing struts, the pronged steel feet digging into the scuffed rubberoid flooring.

"What the hell are you doing?" Some kind of nursing supervisor came bustling toward him, waving a clipboard. "You can't put that thing in here! Whatever it is."

The smiling man turned toward the woman. "Oh, I think I can." Farther along the ward, on all sides, an audience of pregnant women watched the altercation. They all looked huge and imminent, lying on closely spaced beds and gurneys, raising their heads just enough to look over their rounded abdomens to see what the noise was; their passive faces, medicated or endorphined, radiated a Buddhistic calm. "Besides-" His smile grew larger, though less reassuring. "I won't be here long."