K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

He wasn't quite sure what to think. "What was its name?"

"Something beginning with a D, I suppose. Deirdre? Danielle, perhaps. They're short on imagination over at the corporation's design labs. And Holden, of course; they put the same last name on all the units of a particular model. Like they named the Roy Batty replicants after me." He really didn't care about the thing's name. Just giving himself time to think, as he gazed down at the corpse. Time to sort out the physical evidence-things didn't get much more factual than a dead body-and the stuff that wacko Batty kept rattling on about. Which was considerably less reliable. Somebody saves your life, gives you a whole new heart and lungs, and they think they can hand you any old routine. He knew he wasn't buying this one, not without an argument.

"All right," he said. "You got a dead replicant here. And it's obviously a Dave Holden replicant. The female version, at least. That doesn't mean I'm a replicant. I could be the human templant for this model."

"Oh?" Batty raised an eyebrow. "You recall getting any royalty checks from the Tyrell Corporation recently? If they based a replicant model on you, they're supposed to pay for that."

"So they screwed me. Christ, I'd rather believe that than… than… what you're trying to convince me of. That I'm not human at all. Hey, you're the one who's been going on about what a bunch of bastards they are over at the Tyrell Corporation. So now I find out that they owe me money; fine, I'll go over there sometime and collect."

He looked down at the corpse again, then back up to Batty. "Besides, what sense would it make? I'm a replicant, and I get put on the squad hunting down escaped replicants? And don't give me that line about setting a particular kind of cat to hunt a particular kind of rat. You'd have a replicant blade runner hanging around with human blade runners-they're not going to figure it out eventually? Even if I didn't get assigned to track down an escaped Dave Holden replicant, one of the other blade runners would. So he'd either let me know I'm a replicant or he'd come back to the police station and blow me away. In either case, it's not going to be much of a secret any longer, about what's been going on."

"You know…" Batty sighed. "Your problem is that you make all these big assumptions. You just sail right into believing stuff that hasn't been shown to be true."

"Such as?"

"Such as there being any human blade runners at all."

That shut him up for a moment; he hadn't been expecting that line. When Holden spoke again, his voice was tightened by a barely controlled anger. "I don't have a problem, Batty; you do. You're insane. You've got all the classic thought processes of a paranoid schizophrenic."

"Please-" Disgust on Batty's face. "This is what I get for being a nice guy, trying to help people out. Amateur medical advice. You want to believe this or not, fine, it's no skin off my nose. But the truth of the matter is that all the blade runners have always been replicants, from day one. Even before there were any replicants being manufactured in the U.S., back when the industry was located in Stuttgart, and the original developers of the technology-people like Paul Derain, and Sudermann and Grozzi, the ones that Eldon Tyrell eventually ripped off-knew they were dealing with dangerous stuff and they put the first safeguards in place."

Holden had to admit that the other man knew his stuff. Those were names from the ancient history of replicant manufacturing.

"From the start," Batty went on, "those companies had replicants on-line whose sole purpose was to keep other replicants from escaping and trying to pass themselves off as human. That's where the name 'blade runner' comes from; those enforcement replicants were originally called Bleibruhigers. Bleib ruhig is German for 'stay quiet.' And that's what they did, they kept everything nice and quiet; most people around the turn of the century weren't even aware that the replicant technology had been developed. Then when Tyrell and the U.N. brought everything over to the States, and the catching of escaped replicants became a police function, that's when Bleibruhiger got Anglicized to blade runner. The term doesn't make any sense, otherwise."

"That's a nice etymology lesson, Batty, but it doesn't prove anything. Why use replicants to hunt down other replicants? You'd always be risking them realizing that they had their own interests in common. Then they'd conspire back against you."

"Only if the blade runners knew that they were replicants." Batty pointed a finger at him. "You didn't know. And you were one of the best that the LAPD had in the squad. That's the whole point of having replicants do the dirty work. The nature of the blade runner job is nothing but licensed killing-for most thinking, feeling creatures, whether they're human or replicant, that's a corrosive way to live."

Holden shrugged. "I never minded it."

"You know, that's funny, when you think about it-" Batty's eyes glistened in full enjoyment mode. "The whole business of being a blade runner drains the human nature out of the people who do it. People like you. And at the same time, the replicants you're tracking down are trying to be human. Don't you think that's hilarious? The hunter is continuously in the process of turning into a mirror image of the very thing he's hunting. And vice versa. That's what makes it so great

… from sort of an ironic point of view." He shook his head, still smiling. "I love this universe."

"You would." Holden found it easy to resist the other's happy mood. "Right up your alley, obviously."

"Yes, well, the system does work, in its own grinding, soul-destroying way. That's why it's so valuable to have the blade runners be replicants themselves. You know that whole bit-Bryant probably told you about it-about these Nexus-6 replicants having only a four-year life span, as a safeguard against their getting away and on their own? That's nothing new. The blade runner replicants have always been built that way. Four years is just about the optimum time that a blade runner can stay on the Curve and operate at max efficiency, before the burnout starts setting in. You got that four-year window of opportunity, you stuff 'em with some implanted memories so they'll think they're human, give some basic hunting and tracking skills… bam, you got'em right at the peak of the Curve. And then even better-they crap out and die before they go weird on you and become dangerous. Haul the bodies away, bring over some new units of the same models from the Tyrell Corporation, program 'em the same way you did the previous ones, and you're off and running. It's a great system." He shrugged, in a pretense of embarrassed apology. "Except. of course, you die. Over and over, actually. But you're usually not aware of that part, so that's okay."

Holden glared at the other. A chill, deeper and more exhausted than before, had started to settle into his bones.

"Like I said before…" He turned away from the corpse with hi face; it was getting on his nerves. "This is all great talk, but you haven't proven anything. There are other explanations possible for all this. You really haven't shown me any reason to give up believing that I'm the human templant for any Dave Holden replicants. There's no proof"

"There can't be." Batty pulled the sheet back over the dead body. "Not the way you want. That's another problem with you blade runners-you've got it in your head that the difference between human and replicant can be demonstrated. You take it as an article of faith-you couldn't do your job otherwise-that the Voigt-Kampff machine and the empathy tests show who's human and who's not. But at the same time, you've already admitted that we could put the machine on each other, run the tests, and the results would be completely meaningless." He turned an intense, unsmiling gaze on Holden, "You gotta think about what that means. There's a lot of implications. Take that Roy Batty replicant, that copy of me, that you and then Rick Deckard were assigned to retire. Suppose either one of you had managed to catch it, put the Voigt-Kampff machine on it, and run the tests. Would it have flunked because it was a replicant or because it was such a good copy of the human original? If I couldn't pass the empathy tests; and I'm the original, and the copy of me doesn't pass either, then what's the difference between us? The whole premise of the blade runners-the whole methodology by which they operate in this world, going around saying this person's human and this one's not-that whole thing is bogus. Fallacious. It doesn't work because it can't work." Batty glanced down at the shrouded corpse. "Maybe what you should ask yourself is how much of this you've known to be true all along. And you just chose to ignore it because it would've gotten in your way too much."