K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

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…