K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

"Maybe," said Deckard. "Up to a certain point. But I didn't go with him-did I? He had business with me, too. An offer; like being partners again. But I didn't pick up on it."

"Why not?"

"Nothing I was interested in. Besides-" A shrug. "I already have a job."

"Oh?" Sarah raised an eyebrow. "I appreciate your loyalty. But then… you're motivated. Aren't you?"

Something caught his eye. He turned his gaze away from her and saw that it was the broken mirror inside what had been the apartment's bathroom. He could see his own splintered, fragmented reflection, an image that'd been cut up, pieces scrambled together, then sorted out and poorly reassembled.

His brooding was interrupted by a sudden noise, a hissing intake of breath, pitched high and loud enough to be a cry of dismay. At the same time, something grabbed his arm, two hands squeezing tight into the heavier fabric of the coat's sleeve. He looked beside him and saw Sarah, drawing behind him as though for protection, an expression of loathing and disgust on her face.

"What the hell is that?" She took one of her hands away from his arm and pointed.

In the bedroom doorway, the rectangular opening turned on its side, crouched Pris. Or what remained of her, what her lover Sebastian had been able to salvage. The emaciated figure, flensed to the bare minimum inside the ragged leotard, balanced itself with one bony hand against the door frame; the red eyes, dots of fire beneath the uncontrolled shock of white hair, had already scanned across the bedroom space. And fastened onto the other female creature held by it.

"Don't worry." Deckard watched as the Pris-thing unfolded itself spiderlike into the bedroom. "It won't hurt you." The head stayed low, the stare of the red eyes sweeping to either side as it cautiously advanced, as though looking for any possible threat, before returning to Sarah.

"You're right about that." Her other hand let go of his arm, and she began rummaging in the deep pockets of her own coat for something.

"Pris! Pris!" Sebastian's piping voice echoed down the hallway outside. "Don't go in there! Leave those folks alone-"

Beside him, Sarah raised her arms, both hands locked together. He saw what she had pulled out of her coat, the black metal filling her doubled grip.

At the same time the Pris-thing rose up in front of Sarah, spine telescoping like a machine rearing into place. The hissing breath changed into a gasp of wondering surprise, eyes widening to reveal more of the fiery lenses inside the skull. A trembling arm, a skeletal hand reaching its white fingertips toward the face of the woman, drawn back by instinctive aversion. Its mouth opened wider, a word, a name, struggling to bridge some fragile synapse and emerge onto the rattling leather tongue…

He tried to stop Sarah, to grab her arm and pull it away, but he was too late. The smallest motion of one of her fingers was all that was required. The recoil pulsed through her braced stance, pushing her back against his side for a moment. Muzzle flash eclipsed the Pris-thing's ravaged face, only inches away from the black hole at the end of the gun. Even before the afterimage had begun to fade from his sight, he could see the lightweight creature hoisted by the bullet's impact, desiccated splinters spraying from the shattered cheekbones and brow, the spinal column arching into a bow as its shoulders were flung back onto a bed of empty air.

In the doorway, Sebastian screamed. His single hand and forearm had lifted him higher onto the back of the teddy bear, so he'd been able to see everything that'd happened. The toy soldier shoved past the bear, then stood rooted in place, eyes and nose following the Pris-thing's trajectory as it slammed into the angle of two walls.

Nausea rose in Deckard's throat. The last time Pris had died, when he had killed her, the body with its ripped-open gut had flopped and spasmed on the floor, shrieking not so much with pain as with the release of the fierce energy unspent. This time around, the twice-dead Pris lay crumpled like a rag doll, torso folded at the hinge of the lower back, disjointed hands sprawled behind, head bowed forward as though to reveal the red fissure beneath the albino golliwog hair. The red eyes had already dimmed to black dots, any remaining battery cells shorted out.

"You didn't have to do that." The nausea had mutated to a heavy sadness, a stone in his chest, as he'd watched Sebastian crawl from the back of the kneeling teddy bear toward the broken corpse.

Sarah turned a level gaze at him. "Yes, I did."

On the other side of the room, Sebastian had reached the dead thing, had gathered it into the embrace of his single arm, and now rocked back and forth with it. Tears ran along the wrinkles of his face as an anguished keening issued from low in his throat. One of the teddy bear's paws stroked Sebastian's shoulder in a futile effort at comforting him. The toy soldier completed the pieta arrangement, the point of its antique helmet bending low over the corpse's blood-spattered feet.

Deckard crossed the room and looked down at the other man. "Can you…" He gestured at the body. "You know… put her back together?"

"Don't be stupid-" Sebastian gulped back his sobs, enough to speak. "Look. Her brain… it's all tore up. I can't fix that. Nobody can." He leaned the side of his face against what remained of hers. "She's dead. All dead." His tears mingled with her drying blood. A blind gaze swept across the room, a spark of red showing far inside the unfocused eyes. The corpse's clawlike fingers scrabbled at the wall beneath, as though some residual life force had dribbled out of one of its batteries.

"How touching." Sarah's voice, her cold words. Glancing over his shoulder, Deckard saw her returning the dark bulk of the gun to her coat pocket. "Perhaps now we could get back to business."

He stood in front of her. "It recognized you. Didn't it?" He peered into her eyes, as though trying to catch some betraying response without benefit of a Voigt-Kampff machine. "What was that about? When it saw you, it knew who you were."

"I doubt it." No blush response, no flutter of the pupil. "It probably thought I was Rachael. It must've thought it had spotted another replicant like itself."

No. Like she'd thought herself to be. He'd started to correct Sarah, to remind her of what she already knew-that Pris had been human-but had stopped himself from speaking. The distinctions were blurring again. He'd killed, murdered a human being named Pris, who'd convinced herself that she was a replicant; if he'd had a chance to run the empathy tests on her, she probably would've failed them. What had she been after Sebastian had kept a spark going in her addled brain, made her capable of moving again? Alive or dead, human or replicant? He didn't know. He supposed he had arrived at that state Isidore had talked about, back at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. Of not even being able to see the difference anymore.

Other thoughts remained unspoken, barely formed. If it'd been Rachael, not Sarah, that the Pris-thing had recognized… where would that have been from? Maybe some memory of the assembly line at the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters, all the Nexus-6 models, the Prisses and the Zhoras and the Roy Battys, all warehoused together before being shipped off-world. That was wrong, he knew immediately; there had never been any Pris model replicants. Only in her mind. Maybe it'd been out there, thought Deckard, in the U.N. colonies. Maybe Pris had managed to convince other human beings that she was a replicant, and had served time along with a Rachael model in a sanctioned military brothel. The image made him squeeze his eyes shut tight, as though he could blot it out from his own brain. It might not be true, anyway; hadn't Sarah told him that Rachael hadn't been a production model, but a one-off, a single creation for Eldon Tyrell's purposes? She could've been lying about that; there was no way of knowing…