K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

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.