K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

She closed her eyes. That was part of the payoff, the regular arrangement between herself and Andersson, that kept him working for her, plus the checks drawn upon the Tyrell Corporation's black operations account and made payable to an electronics supply warehouse in Mexico City. The arrangement must have been satisfactory to Andersson: she had lost track of which installment this was. Easy to forget that she wanted this, wanted everything, as much as he did..

Something else to be sorry about. That the arrangement had come to an end; she knew it, even if he didn't yet. At the edge of her awareness, she felt her hand remove itself from his back and reach inside her coat pocket, for the object she had taken from the drawer of the bureau plat down in her uncle's office.

Andersson gasped-too soon, at least for him; she could feel the shock wave run through his body. He pushed himself back from her, his spine arching. One hand clawed at his back, fingertips smearing through the bright red that had burst open there.

"Goddamn…" He'd rolled onto his side, finally having managed to pull out the knife she had inserted, point first, between his shoulder blades. Andersson shook his head ruefully. "I knew you were going to do this. I knew it…" The knife clattered on the hard surface of the landing deck. He managed to push himself up into a sitting position, propped up against the spinner. His blood shone on the black metal. "It's not like…" Voice weaker. "… it's unexpected…

"Please don't ask me why." She kept her own voice formal, polite. She had gotten to her feet and was now putting her own disarrayed clothing back in order, reaching down to smooth the skirt of the dress over her knees. "I'd find it tiresome to explain." Sarah straightened up, noticing a spot of his blood on the front of her blouse. Silk, and thus ruined.

He managed to laugh. "Don't bother…" He gazed at her, almost admiringly. "It's pretty much… the nature of the business…"

Checking the time, as much by glancing up at the sun as looking at the slender watch on her wrist. And waiting; as always, Sarah hoped he wouldn't take too long.

A few minutes later she succeeded in dragging his body to the low parapet surrounding the landing deck, her shoes leaving a triangle and dot pattern in the thin pool of his blood. She was surprised at how light he seemed when dead; she had unexpectedly little trouble in lifting the corpse high enough to topple it over into the empty space at the center of the Tyrell Corporation's slanting towers. Adrenaline, she thought; some little surge in her own bloodstream, unnoticed by her cognitive processes, had perhaps given her the extra strength required,

Andersson's body fell of its own accord, arms and legs splayed out in air. Hands braced against the parapet, she watched until it was lost to sight; the corporation's employees, working in the replicant manufacturing units that formed the base and core of the complex, had no doubt already had the surprise of the corpse smashing into one of the reinforced skylights above their heads.

Business to take care of — Sarah straightened up and took her cell phone out of her coat pocket, punched in the security division. "There's been an accident." She smoothed her hair into place as she spoke. "It can be taken care of on an internal basis. There's no need to call in the police." She gave a few more details, some of them true, then disconnected. The corporation's own security people were drones, without Andersson's initiative; she could count on them to do no more than what she wanted. Even the mess up here on the landing deck-they'd all keep their silence, and their jobs.

She started to turn away, to walk back toward the elevator doors, then stopped. A shudder ran through her body; dizzy and nauseous, she had to lean against the spinner for balance. The adrenaline, and whatever other hormones had been released, now seemed to evaporate from her veins. She closed her eyes, her pulse scurrying faster, breath quick and shallow. "I'm sorry," she spoke aloud. As if there were anyone to hear her, as if it would have done any good if there had been. She resisted the impulse to lie back down upon the deck and curl up with her trembling fists and elbows tucked close against herself.

The attack passed. Breath slower and deeper again-she took the few steps back to the parapet and looked across the vast space, to the three other towers of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. A city in itself, surrounded by the larger compressed mass of Los Angeles. The four towers slanted in toward each other and the truncated pyramid in their midst, like the petals of a cubist flower that hadn't fully opened yet. When she had come back from Zurich, with the corporate minions who now worked for her, she'd been given the grand tour, through all the sectors of the complex, the areas that she'd never been allowed to enter while her uncle had been alive. It'd taken days to complete. They had told her everything, all the secrets. Including what they had called the red button, though there wasn't any red button, but an overlapping series of commands that had once been keyed to Eldon Tyrell's voice pattern, but hadn't been keyed over to hers. The one thing beyond her control-even as the minions had been telling her about what would happen if she could have spoken those magic words, a vision had come to her. That had made her heart swell with a fierce gladness.

She looked out now across the landing deck's parapet, that vision overlaying the solid, slanting towers. Fire and force, this world she owned riven by its own private apocalypse. The explosions would start at the base of the structures and continue upward, following the Wagnerian sequence of the programming that had been built into them from the beginning…

Brennt das Holz heilig brunstig und hell, sengt die Glut sehrend den glanzenden Saal…

"'If the wood catches fire,'" she murmured, eyes closed, "'and solemnly, brightly burns, then the flames will destroy the glorious hall…'"

Wagner had that much right, at least. Not programming; she knew that was a stupid word for it. Fate was the true word.

Der ewigen Gotter Ende dammert ewig da auf…

"'The eternal gods' last day then dawns… '

Sarah opened her eyes. The vision had faded, leaving the parallelogram towers of the Tyrell Corporation still standing.

She turned away and headed for the elevator, to go back down inside the building's heart.

He'd made his decision. Or, at least, the next step in his rapidly evolving plans.

What do I need this loony sonuvabitch around for? Dave Holden glanced over at Batty, sitting beside him in the cockpit of the freight spinner. They were flying west, returning from the Reclamation Center out in the desert, to the sprawl of the city. The same harsh sunlight that darkened the curved glass's photochrome membrane heated the brown stew of pollutants hanging in the air above L.A.; he could see it up ahead, like an old, frayed edge wool blanket spread over the simmering buildings. Batty's hands moved across the controls, manually piloting the craft. When he was busy doing something, he didn't look quite so maniacal. But that didn't change the situation.

The question didn't need an answer — Holden had decided that part a while back. But there were other questions that did.

"So, uh, exactly what is your interest in all this?"

"I told you." Batty turned his cracked smile on him again. "The sixth replicant. The one that's still missing."

"What about it?" The smile still had the capacity for making him nervous. "You just want to shake its hand or something? Get an autograph?"

"Don't want anything from it. Except to find it and kill it. And take back the evidence to the people who hired me that I've completed this little job for them."

"And who's that?"