Deckard found the last remark unimpressive. “Numbers don’t mean anything.
Except the number of bullets needed.”
“Come on,” chided the briefcase. “Why should you be so skeptical? You blind or something? Look around—you know what the situation is around here. You and all the rest of the would-be emigrants—you’re bottled up here like ants in a Mason jar. Why do you think no one’s been allowed to travel on and outward in the last half a dozen years? The U.N. just keeps stacking people up in these hovels, letting them go stim-crazy, eating themselves up out of sheer fucking boredom. The clamp’s on, the bottleneck’s there, because the U.N. can’t let emigrants go on to the outer colonies. The replicants control the territory.
Otherwise, the U.N. would just go ahead and shoot you and all the rest of the wanna-be emigrants out there, let you take the consequences. Which would be death. And why would the U.N. care about that?” The briefcase’s voice indicated another invisible shrug. “The whole point of the emigration plan is to get people off Earth—if they wind up corpses in the process, that’s no big deal.”
There would be another advantage, as well, that Deckard could see. We wouldn’t talk, he thought. Not if we were all dead. In that way, the replicants, the rebellion, would still be doing the U.N.’s work for it. Slaughtered emigrants wouldn’t be getting any word back to Earth, to families or strangers, about what had gone wrong with all the big plans for humanity’s future out in the stars. Better to have corpses littering the alien turf rather than disgruntled returnees coming back and letting everyone know that their promised slaves had gotten murderously uppity.
“Figure it out.” The briefcase’s voice continued hectoring him. “If the U.N. could regain control of the outer colonies, then they could continue funneling emigrants to any destination they wanted, rather than letting them stack up here. But to do that, to get that control again, the U.N. would need to have its own off-world military problems squared away—and they can’t do that.
They’re screwed; the U.N. depended too much on beefing up the ranks with replicant soldiers, like the ones for which they used me for the templant-Nexus-6 Roy Batty models, like that one you were assigned to track down in L.A. Only it just about wound up handing you your ass, didn’t it, Deckard?”
The briefcase barked another quick, humorless laugh. “That’s the problem with the Tyrell Corporation’s having put out such a good product. Even if the Batty replicants aren’t quite as tough and smart as the human original-me, at least when I was still walking around inside a body—they’re still pretty mean customers. If the U.N. thought it could put together an off-world military force out of pieces like that, and there wouldn’t be a price to pay, they must’ve been dreaming.”
Deckard slowly nodded; he could get behind that. Dreaming, he mused. That was what most of life had become, for himself and-apparently-everyone else. Lost in it, so that the difference between this world and any other was harder and harder to make out. For Sarah as well, thought Deckard. More for her, perhaps, than anyone else. He had sensed that a long time ago, in the decaying little cabin in the woods, the hiding place to which he and Rachael had fled; when he had seen Sarah look down at her replicant double-at Rachael sleeping in the black coffin of the transport module extending her rapidly dwindling life span—he had detected the envy radiated by Sarah as she had laid her hand on the cold glass, inches away from the mirror image of her own face. Envy of the sleeping, the dreaming, the dying; envy of the dead and the loved. So much so that Sarah had fallen into her own dreaming, a world in which she could at last become Rachael. The real, the original, trying to evolve into the unreal, the double, the shadow . . . the realer than real.
And if somebody as smart, as survival-oriented as Sarah Tyrell could fall into the dreaming trap, then why not everybody else? Right up to the faceless scheming bureaucrats of the U.N.—Deckard couldn’t see why they should be immune. What a stupid idea, he thought, shaking his head. Create another race, smarter and stronger and possibly even meaner than human beings, then figure they’ll do just fine as slaves, tugging their forelocks and singing choruses of “Ol’ Man Ribber” in whatever cotton fields baked under alien suns. There weren’t enough bullets in enough blade runners’ guns to keep that kind of payback from working its way to Earth.
“You know,” Deckard’s nod grew even slower and deeper. “I could almost believe all this.”
“Why would a briefcase lie to you?” The inaudible shrug sounded again in Batty’s voice. “The condition I’m in, I’ve pretty much transcended all mortal desires.”
“So tell me something else.” Deckard leaned the knots of his spine against the chair. Every muscle in his body had tensed. He felt the trap closing in on him—the sharp points of its teeth were just beginning to show. “Give me the rest of the spiel. The rep-symps—the real ones, not the head cases—they scraped your corpse off the freeway ruins, cracked your skull like a raw egg, and downloaded you into this thing. That’s about the size of it, right? That’s the line you’ve been giving me.”
“You know it. First time anybody’s gotten this much of a handle on me.”
“Big question.” Deckard studied the briefcase as though it had a face whose secrets he could read out. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“The rep-symps want you in a box, that’s their business. But why have Dave Holden bring you to me? What do I need you for?”
“You don’t,” Batty’s voice replied coolly. “You’ve already shown how . . . proficient you are at engineering your own sorry fate. It’s the other way around; the rep-symps need you.”
“To do what?” Deckard’s own voice went tight and harsh. “What’s the job?”
“Simple,” said Batty. “They need you to deliver something. To the replicants.
The insurgents.”
“Yeah? Deliver what?”
One word. “Me.”
He’d been afraid it would be something like that. “Why,” Deckard asked wearily, “would anybody want you delivered to them? Unless they were running short on novelty items.”
“You’re a sarcastic sonuvabitch, Deckard. Believe me—“The voice coming from the briefcase turned darkly vehement. “If I could walk to where I needed to get to, I would. Rather than put up with your charming manner.”
“Nothing says you have to.” Deckard shrugged. “There may not be any emigrants going to the outer colonies, but there’s still cargo shipments heading out of here. Tell you what—I’ll spring for the postage. Cover you with stamps, and you’re on your way.”
“Unfortunately—” The briefcase emitted a snort of disgust. “You have to come along. You’re somewhat necessary to the whole operation.”
“Why? What’s inside you?”
“It’s not what’s inside me, Deckard. It’s what I am. The rep-symps back on Earth programmed more than just the contents of my skull into this box. They had other information they wanted to cram in here. Specifically, Isidore’s list.”
Tilting his head, Deckard frowned. “What list?”
“Come on.” The briefcase’s voice sounded impatient. “You didn’t have a whole lot of contact with Isidore back there at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, before Sarah Tyrell had him iced. He was a little bit on the fussy and meticulous side. He kept records.”
“Records of what? How many mechanical cats he changed the batteries on?”
“Get real, Deckard. A cop like you should be able to guess what. The escaped replicants, all the ones that made their way back to Earth and then went through the disguising process at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital—Isidore kept a list of every single one that he worked on, that he made capable of passing as fully human. And their new identities, the aliases that he came up with for them. Everything, all the info. Who they were, who they became, where they are—he kept it all.”