He slouched down in the chair, hating the guy. 'You're gonna tell me.'
'That's why you're huh-here, Deckard. It's not just that there can be false positives on the Voigt-Kampff test. That blade runners have been icing humans — ruh-real humans — that flunked the test for one reason or another. It's also that wuh-once you admit that fallibility of the empathy-testing methodology, you admit the possibility of false negatives. Replicants who pass the test, who walk right by you because your big deal Voigt-Kampff machines tuh-tuh-told you they were human.'
'A possibility.' A shrug. 'Big deal. Anything's possible. Doesn't mean it ever happened.'
'Buh-but you see…' Isidore folded his hands together in his lap. 'I can prove it's happened. That replicants can get past the empathy tests, your fancy-shuh-shmancy Voigt-Kampff machines. Even before the Nexus-6 models came on-line, they were getting puh-past. For years now — muh-maybe decades — there've been escaped replicants walking around on Earth. Right here in L.A., even. And there's nothing that you or any of the other blade runners can do about it. Because you can't find them.'
'Metaphysics.' He glared back at the other man. 'Bullshit. You're talking religion. Articles of faith. Postulating an invisible entity — it exists but you can't see it. Nobody can. Replicants passing as human — they exist because you think they have to exist. Good luck proving that one.'
'Nuh-nuh-not faith, Deckard. But reality. I've seen them, talked to them, wuh-watched them come and go…' Isidore's gaze shifted away, refocusing on the radiance of an inner vision. 'Oh, much more than that. I know everything about them. Isn't that fuh-fuh-funny?' An expression of amazement. 'I'm the person who couldn't ever see the difference, between human and not, between the fuh-fake and the real — you could see those things, but I couldn't. I was blind to them. And I won. The way I see things… it became real. From in here.. ' He tapped the side of his head again. 'To everywhere.' The fingertip moved away from the skull. 'I made it real.'
He stayed silent, watching. A few minutes before he'd been sure that the other man was insane. Now he wasn't sure. Of anything.
The gaze of the enlightened, of those who know the truth, turned upon him once more.
'Don't you see, Deckard?' The voice soft and gentle, stammer evaporated. 'That's what the business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital was all along — or at least that's what it had become before old Mr. Sloat left it to me. His legacy. When I found out what he'd been doing — what we'd all been doing — I didn't have any choice. I had to go on with it.'
He peered closer at the man. 'With what?'
'Turning fakes — what you'd call fakes — into the real. That's what we'd started out doing, with the animals — building and repairing them so they couldn't be distinguished from the ones that'd been born that way. Doing it with animals is legal; Hannibal Sloat just took it the next logical step. The necessary step. The Van Nuys Pet Hospital is the last station on the underground railway for escaped replicants: when they get out of the off-world colonies and reach Earth, they come straight here. Right under the noses of the blade runners and all the rest of the LAPD; who'd ever think of raiding a pet hospital? Hm? And then when the escaped replicants get here… I fix them. And when I get done fixing them… they can pass an empathy test. I tweak their involuntary reaction times, their blush responses, their pupil fluctuations, so they can sail right past a Voigt-Kampff machine. And they do pass; they always pass.' Isidore nodded slowly, as if he'd just thought of something. 'So given that there've been some real humans who've flunked the empathy tests… I guess that makes my fixed-up replicants realer than real, huh?'
'If they exist at all.' The other man's words had stung him, needled him back into a way of thinking, a way of being that he'd thought he'd given up completely. 'If they existed… we would've caught them eventually. At least some of them.' Deckard could hear an old brutality setting steel in his voice. 'And it's got nothing to do with being a blade runner. It's about being a cop. And what cops know. You're talking conspiracy, buddy. Anytime you got that many in on something, some of them are gonna crack. They're not as strong as the others, they're not as good at hiding, at sweating it out when they know they're being hunted. All it takes is one, and then the whole game's up. And that's how we would've caught your fixed-up replicants. If they existed.'
'True…' Isidore nodded slowly. 'As you say, not everybody has the nerves for hiding. For staying hidden. You and the rest of the blade runners must be proud of having made yourselves into such objects of fear. Tuh-terrorists, really. But this is something that old Mr. Sloat knew all about. And knew what to do about it, too. And I've done the same as he did. There's more than just the blush response that can be fixed on an escaped replicant. There's the memory; that can be fixed as well.'
'Now I know you're bullshitting me. False memories in replicants are implanted at their incept dates. When the replicants are created. The phony memories are part of them from the beginning.'
'You're wrong, Deckard. Or puh-partly so. The incept date is when the Tyrell Corporation shoves in whatever false memories they want their replicants to have. But it's not the only time it can be done. The neural access pathway is hard-wired into the replicants' neocortices. In fact, the bandwidth of the data channel is one of the design features of the Nexus-6 line; I could show you the schematics. It was so the corporation could cram more stuff into their heads before they sent them off the assembly lines. But the access to the memory areas is still there, like a door without even a lock on it. You juh-just have to know where to look for it. And then use it.'
'And that's what you did. Supposedly.'
'Oh, yeah.' A look of dreamy triumph moved behind Isidore's glasses. 'No 'supposedly' about it. It's my job. I'm very good at it. And when I'm done…' His gaze sharpened once more. 'Some of the people you thought were humans, they were actually replicants and they didn't even know it. You'd be surprised to learn who they were. And are.'
The room seemed suddenly smaller, as though the walls had snugged up against his shoulders. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Like I said, Deckard…' The other's voice was as smooth and piercing as a hypodermic. 'You'd be surprised. Very, very surprised.'
5
As the search party topped the last big rise, a fifty-floor office tower now laid out on the ground like a cubist obsidian snake, the first smoky flush of dawn crept over the horizon. Gonna be a hot one — Sebastian could already feel the sun's blistering kiss on his face. Until the monsoons came back, every one was a hot one.
Up above, stars were still set in blackness, the atmosphere scoured raw by the Santa Ana winds rolling over the desert. During the trek back, three lines of fire, evenly spaced, had cut across the sky. From the north and veering downtown — he'd twisted around to watch the distant spinners, wondering who the hell was in them. Somebody important, he'd figured. But none of his business. He'd laid his check against the back of Fuzzy's head, conserving his own dwindled strength.
When they reached home, he made his two pals wait out in the corridor. He crawled over the frame of the nest's tilted doorway. his one hand pulling him laboriously forward. 'Hey, Pris? Sweetheart? I got something special for you.' With a string knotted around his wrist, he dragged behind him one of the candy boxes from the welfare bundle. 'Where are you, honey?'
His eyes took a long time adjusting to the room's darkness; the metallic curtains stapled over the windows, including the one that the building's fall had turned into a skylight, shut out all but a thin trace of the advancing light. In the corner a mop of dead-white hair rustled. A face, more wrinkled and deracinated than even Sebastian's ancient one, lifted from bent knees clutched to flattened girl-chest. Eye sockets, blind but for thermal scans, turned toward the legless, one-armed supplicant.
'Look-' He knew Pris, or what was left of her, couldn't look, not really. But acting like she or it could was good enough. Under these circumstances. Sebastian reeled the box into his hand, then held it out. 'I brought you this-'
An inaudible shriek, leathery jaw hinges yanked wide, as the Pris-thing sprung from its crouch. Its bone hand slapped the box from Sebastian's grasp; the chocolate-covered cherries spattered gooey wounds across the inverted walls and ceiling. A rattling hiss, a remnant scream, came from its throat as it reached down, grabbed, and threw him across the room.
'Yes…' Tears of pain and joy filled his eyes. From where he'd landed, he watched as that which he loved jerked in spastic tantrum, arms flailing pinwheels as it lurched away. He nodded slowly. 'Yes.. I love you, too.'
