K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

In this small pocket of security-when it'd originally been set up as a safe house, the exterior walls had been injected with both thermal and acoustic sensor-tracker foils-he felt a measure of tension drain out of his cramped shoulders. But only for a moment. He looked down, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness, and saw a miniature Prussian soldier, with a clown's rouged cheeks and an elongated nose, tip broken off, gazing back up at him. The little soldier's eyes went wide in frightened realization.

"I know you!" Its voice was pitched comically high. "I saw you before!" It spun on the heel of its cavalry boot and ran toward the apartment's bedroom door. "Sebastian! Sebastian! There's a man here-a bad man! A killer! Sebastian!"

Before Deckard could react, the door sprang open, its knob whacking the surface on which he stood. Something flew out, knocking the little soldier aside. Something that spun and twisted, and struck him full in the chest before he could get out of its screaming trajectory.

He landed on his back, with a pair of what felt like hands gripping tight around his throat. A white-haired wraith knelt on his chest, its teeth clenched and eyes radiating a murderous fury. He recognized it, even though when he'd seen it before it'd had the face of a young woman, and now wore the skeletal mask of deracinated leather. Its wrists felt like corded bones in his hands as he struggled against its throttling hold.

"Pris!" Another voice, from somewhere else in the tilted room. "Don't do that! You'll hurt him!"

At the edge of his sight, drowning in a red haze, Deckard saw a man with the face of a wrinkled baby, strapped to the back of an animated teddy bear. The man tugged with a single hand at the crazed figure's arm, its tattered leotard tearing open farther. Deckard felt himself falling away from the visions of combined nightmare and memory, the cutoff of his own breath turning red to black.

"I'm real sorry about that." Fussy and nervous, a voice that suited the man, or what was left of him. "Sometimes Pris just goes off that way-even with me. She's got like you know? — a hair-trigger temperament. That probably indicates some sort of deep-seated anger inside her."

"You could say." Lying on a bare mattress inside the safe-house apartment, Deckard watched as Sebastian-a bio-engineer who'd formerly freelanced for the Tyrell Corporation; he remembered the police file on the guy-busied himself making coffee. A complicated process: the teddy bear, eyes tarnished as the buttons on its nineteenth-century waistcoat, had to back up to the sideways-mounted sink, while the triple amputee in the papoose carrier used the end of the counter as a flat surface for the grinder and French press. "Maybe she remembers me." Deckard rubbed his bruised throat. "Maybe she remembers me blowing her away. That might do it."

"Gee… I don't know." Sebastian struggled to press the plunger down. "I can't exactly be sure what Pris does remember." Black coffee grounds were scattered all over, from the spilled bag of expensive welfare-drop rations. "Sometimes I wonder if she remembers me. And I'm the best friend she ever had-even when she was alive." He finished pouring, then held out the cup on a cracked Meissen dessert plate. "Squeaker, would you take this over to our guest?"

The miniature soldier, the spike-helmeted figure that Deckard had first encountered in the safe-house apartment, grudgingly brought the coffee to him. It gazed balefully past its stretched nose, still regarding him with suspicion; the soldier's memory seemed unimpaired, at least. Deckard pushed himself into a sitting position and took the cup. "How much of her cerebral functioning were you able to save?"

"Oh, most of it, actually." Sebastian sipped from a demitasse. He appeared ancient as a baby bird, almost incapable of feeding itself, the skin of his hand and face translucent, crumpled parchment. "But those Nexus-6 circuits are real fiddly. It's basically an unstable design, with a lot of kludges and work-arounds. I warned Mr. Tyrell about putting 'em out on the market; I told him there'd be trouble. You start havin' to do recalls and boom, your profit margin's all shot to heck. Just the return shipping costs alone, from the off-world colonies…" A shudder ran through the abbreviated torso in the papoose carrier. "You can't just stick a postage stamp on 'em and send 'em home, you know."

"That's true." The coffee was hot and bitter on Deckard's tongue. "They tend to get into trouble."

"Yeah…" Sebastian took another sip. "But like I said, it's mainly the flaws in the Nexus-6 design. They're susceptible to having visions and stuff. Nearly as bad as real humans."

"Whatever." Didn't seem a point worth discussing. Through the doorway into the even dimmer back sections of the apartment, the mobile scarecrow that'd been the replicant Pris sulked and glared at him, its eyes two red embers somewhere below its albino fright-wig. His skin still prickled tense at the sight of her, a response triggered by the memory of her nearly killing him, riding his shoulders and slamming her fists into the sides of his skull, then twisting his head around like a broken doll's. "You must've moved fast, to get your hands on her at all." The last he'd seen of her, before this encounter in the safe-house apartment, she'd been flopping around on her back, spitting and shrieking in her death throes, the bullet from his gun having torn open her midsection.

"I sure did." Sebastian nodded. "I loaded her up in my van, from the police morgue-I had a pass for doing that. They'd already done their tests on her, so I didn't think they'd mind anyway. Not that I was going to stick around and ask 'em. I figured there'd be an arrest warrant out for me pretty soon. 'Cause I snuck out of a police-custody hospital, my own self-they thought I was dead when I got found up in the Tyrell private suite, most likely since I look so decrepit and stuff, but I'd just kinda passed out, is all; they got my heart started up again, out in the ambulance. But I figured the police probably had me down as having helped Batty get in to kill old Mr. Tyrell. So I just took Pris's body and my little pals, and lit out for this zone. Where they wouldn't be able to find us."

"Good thinking. Accessory to murder's a hard rap in this town. Especially when the evidence is on tape."

"It's a bum rap, is what it is." An indignant expression settled across Sebastian's watery eyes. "I would never have hurt Mr. Tyrell; I know he wasn't a very nice man and all, but he was my friend. Sort of. That's why I tried to warn him. That something funny was going on." Sebastian's voice grew excited. "When Roy and I were coming up in the elevator, to Mr. Tyrell's personal suite-I was supposed to tell him that I'd figured out my next moves, in the chess game we'd been playing. Well, Roy'd figured 'em out; I just repeated what he told me. Only-I bet it's on the securitysystem tape-when I was supposed to say 'Checkmate,' instead of that I said, 'Checkmate, I think.' That's how I was trying to warn Mr. Tyrell that something was wrong, without letting on to Roy that I was doing it."

The words came out in a babbling rush. "You see, 'cause I didn't know it at the time," Sebastian went on, "but it was like a famous chess game that Mr. Tyrell'd set up-the one that's called the Immortal Game, between a coupla old-time grand masters, way long ago-Roy told me about it, when he showed me the moves I should make. All that chess stuff was part of his memory implant, some of what Mr. Tyrell himself had programmed inside Roy's head. I could never've figured 'em out on my own; Mr. Tyrell knew I couldn't play chess on his level. So when I said I think, he should've known I didn't get the moves out of a book, and that somebody else must've told me, and that person was probably with me right then, so he should've called the corporate security folks instead of letting us in, 'cause I knew Roy was up to no good-'