“Hey! Screw you, pal!” Batty’s miffed voice sounded again. “I’d kick your ass—if I could get to it.”
Both men ignored the angry words. “So what is the deal?” Deckard pointed to the briefcase. “All that stuff you were talking about a memetic bomb. Some kind of data, pure information. That the U.N. security forces want to get piped to the insurgents. What kind of data would cause that much damage, to make all this worthwhile?”
“You got to remember,” said Marley. “The Tyrell Corporation had all sorts of clever ideas. Eldon Tyrell had a knack for looking ahead and imagining the worst possibilities. Like the replicants’ getting out from under his and the U.N.’s control. So they built in things like the four-year life span. But that wasn’t the only fail-safe mechanism that Tyrell designed into the replicants. There’s another one that’s specifically re lated to the whole reproductive issue. The only reason it works is that it’s a variation on a deeply buried mammalian instinct, some dark coding that’s in the primitive layers of the human nervous system. Which is, after all, the basis for the replicant nervous system, so it’s in there as well. All that Eldon Tyrell did was to invert part of it, design his own little twist into the replicants.” Marley took a deep breath before going on. “The original instinctive behavior is the one by which adult male animals are driven to kill the offspring of other adult males of the same species, thus increasing the ratio of their own offspring in the breeding group; it’s sometimes called the ‘stepfather syndrome.’ Just one of those ugly parts of genetically directed behavior where the gene’s own survival and propagation are the only things important to it. Morality doesn’t enter into the equation. What Eldon Tyrell did with the replicants he designed was to program in a pair of aberrations to that basic, primitive instinct. The first was to make it much stronger, to the point of being a homicidal obsession; the child-murdering behavior takes over the entire organism, overriding even its own instincts for self-preservation.
The other aberration on the basic instinct directs the behavior toward the organism’s own offspring. You following me? The organism—the replicant-murders his own children. It’s like a breakdown in an extended immune system, one that extends beyond the replicant’s own skin. The primitive drive is inverted, so that the individual attacks and destroys the very thing it’s supposed to protect.”
“I don’t get it,” said Deckard. “If that’s the behavior that’s programmed into the replicants, then there’s no contest. There’s no way that they can win any kind of struggle against the U.N.’s colonists. Because they’ll destroy themselves; they’ll reproduce, but they’ll murder their own children. It’s all over for them. They’re a biological dead end.”
“Not quite. The ‘stepfather syndrome’ behavior is built into them, but it’s buried. It’s not activated unless it’s triggered. That’s where you come in, Deckard. You and the little job you agreed to undertake for the cops and the U.N. security forces that had managed to inifitrate the rep-symp underground. You’re carrying the trigger right here in this briefcase. The data that’s been imbedded in it isn’t any list of disguised replicants on Earth; that was just the cover story to get you to agree to the job. What the people who put this together did was encode the memetic bomb, the trigger to activate the buried behavior pattern, and stick it in here, in this box. Then they wrapped it up, like putting a bow on a birthday present, by imbedding Roy Batty’s cerebral contents in there-more to goad you into taking on the delivery job than to actually help you get there. Because in reality, you don’t need any help; there’s no real effort being made by the authorities to stop you. The U.N. and the police, all of them—they want you to get there. You delivering that briefcase to the replicant insurgents is what their big plan is all about. You’d be showing up on the replicants’ doorstep with the trigger to the bomb that’s already wired into them. The buried behavior pattern would be activated, and there’d be nothing they could do to stop it. And that’d be the end of the replicants. When they die, there’d be no replicant children to replace them.”
“This is crap,” growled Batty’s voice. “Don’t listen to this jerk. He’s just playing with your mind, Deckard. He’s the one who’s working for the authorities.”
“I’m afraid our friend here protests too much.” Marley rapped his knuckles on the briefcase’s lid. “He’s hardly a disinterested party in this whole affair, is he? Since his whole existence is bound up with what the two of you have been told about his contents. And why you should go ahead and deliver them.”
“There’s someone else,” said Deckard. “Batty’s not the only one. There was someone else who convinced me I should do it.”
“Ah, yes. Our transcendent authority in these matters.” Marley nodded. “The good Sebastian, who’s gone from this mortal realm to a higher if slightly smaller one. It only goes to show that even a deity, albeit a dehydrated one, can be wrong.”
“You knew I went to see him? In his little pocket universe?”
“Of course.” Marley gave a casual shrug. “The people I’m working for—the real rep-symps-know all kinds of things. The other rep-symps may have been infiltrated and taken over by the police, but it doesn’t end there. My bunch has its contacts and moles on the other side. They know what kind of data was imbedded in the briefcase, and what else they put in it. And what they instructed Batty to tell you so you’d go off and get convinced by Sebastian about your holy mission. Your delivery job. The problem is, Sebastian can tell you only what he himself believes to be true; he’s not omniscient, at least as far as this world goes.”
If he couldn’t believe Sebastian—and Deckard had to admit that could be the case, that the little genetic engineer, even in his new transfigured incarnation, could’ve been lied to and misled—the question became, once more, a matter of trusting anyone at all. This Marley character had at least the advantage of a certain cold logic on his side to carry his arguments. They’ve made it easy for me, thought Deckard. He glanced over at the video monitor.
All it would have taken, a simple thing, was to have let the director Urbenton go ahead and dub Deckard’s face onto the actor playing him. A standard production technique. And then I would’ve been a marked man. Anybody in the emigrant colony could have recognized him and turned him in, if the authorities had, in fact, been hunting him down. But instead .
“You’re asking me to believe a lot,” said Deckard. “Not that everybody I run into hasn’t been doing the same. But this ‘stepfather syndrome’ business—this memetic bomb that I’m supposed to be carrying—that seems pretty extreme. Why should I believe you on this one? Got any proof?”
“Mere evidence isn’t enough for you.” The smile appeared on Marley’s face again. “Or logic, what you can figure out about what’s happening around you—”
“It’s not that.” Deckard didn’t bother with a smile. “I just don’t trust murderers.”
One of Marley’s eyebrows rose. “So not even yourself?”
“Especially not myself.”
“All right,” said Marley, exuding an affable calm. “You want proof? Or at least as much as can be gotten in this fallible universe.
Fine—you’ve been carrying it around with you.”
“The briefcase?” Deckard laid his hand on it. “I thought that was the whole problem, not the answer.”