K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

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?"