Holden opened his eyes.
'Wait a minute.' Not lying down, but sitting up. No black attache case, either gurgling or silent, strapped to his chest. Holden looked down at his own right hand prodding his sternum. A strip of navy-blue cloth dangled from his throat. 'What the…' His voice louder now as well, almost deafening as it reverberated inside his skull. 'What happened…
'I had to break into that storage locker downtown, that one where all your stuff got shoved when they cleaned out your old apartment.' A now-familiar voice sounded from somewhere nearby. 'Sorry about that. There might be somebody you could bill for the padlock I busted.'
Holden looked over and saw Roy Batty sprawling with hands clasped behind his head, folding metal chair tilted back onto its rear legs. Watching him. He glanced down at himself again and saw that the strip of cloth was a necktie, one of his own good silk ones. The white shirt and grey suit, and everything else, were his as well. Stuff from another life, the one he'd lived before he'd gotten blown away at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Another life, another world.
'How you feeling? You feeling okay?' Batty had rocked forward in the metal chair. He examined a small remote control in one hand. 'The doctors said these settings were about right, for your body weight and everything. You lost some muscle mass while you were flopped down in the hospital for so long. The works we implanted will automatically adjust for when you start getting back in shape. Probably give you a little more blood flow then, I guess.'
Holden pushed the necktie aside and undid a couple of the shirt buttons. His bare chest was no longer an open, gutted wound; no tubes or hoses sticking out, either. An intricate map of scars and black stitches overlaid his pallid white skin.
'Don't go poking too much at those. They're not too fragile — I made 'em use the heavy-duty sutures — but you don't want to get them infected.'
Holden traced his fingertip down one of the vertical lines. A dull twinge of pain, as though wired to tissue deep inside him. Plus either the faint sense or hallucination of muted ticking and sucking noises buried underneath the reconstructed flesh and bone.
'What's going on?' He looked up at Batty. 'What's been done to me?'
'What, you worried about the bill or something? Jeez.' Batty shook his head in amazement. 'It's paid for, okay? You've been given a new lease on life, buddy. Free, gratis, por nada. So don't sweat it. Enjoy it, already.'
'Implants…' He laid his hand fiat against his stitched chest, feeling against his palm the hum and surge of the machinery inside him. 'A complete set… heart and lungs…' He took a deep breath, a last trace of spider-silk lifting from his brain. At the back of his throat was a taste of plastic and stainless steel.
'State of the art. None finer.' Batty held up the remote. 'I told the people here to use the best parts they could get None of those pulls they've taken out of other jobs and had sitting in a bucket somewhere.'
'But they told me… at the hospital…' A tone of wonder in his voice. 'They told me one time, when they brought me around, that they couldn't do implants. The damage was too great…'
'So? They lied to you. Simple.'
Nothing cleared up by that. 'Why would they lie? The doctors, and Bryant and everybody… it doesn't make sense.'
Batty's smile rose, thin and all-knowing. 'Makes sense… depending upon who you figure your friends are. Your real friends.'
The spooky hint of conspiracy in Batty's voice set him thinking. 'Could I see that?' He held out his hand for the remote control.
'Sure.'
Only a couple of buttons on the device. 'This switches everything off? Switches me off?' Holden didn't wait for an answer. He put the remote down on the floor and crushed it with his heel. A sound of splintering plastic and microchips, followed by a surge in his heartbeat, which then settled back down.
'Way to go!' Batty tilted his head back and laughed. The flimsy prefab walls trembled with his hilarity. 'I'm sure they got another one of those things around here somewhere, but I admire your attitude. A couple, what, maybe four hours ago, you were at death's door… literally. That fuckin' hospital. Man, people go to places like that just to punch out. And they help you do it. Now here you are-' He gestured expansively toward Holden. 'Feeling like your old self, I bet. Miracles of modern science. You got nothing to complain about.'
Holden turned his head toward an uncurtained window. He'd seen that it was still dark outside, but he hadn't known what night this was, the same one in which Batty had snatched him out of the hospital, or one weeks or months later. 'Your people here work fast.' He looked back toward Batty.
'They're good at what they do. Get a lot of practice, I suppose.'
Inside himself, he sensed the continuous operation of the bio-machines — the new parts of his body, the conglomeration of Teflon and inert alloys and efficient little motors that he'd absorbed, incorporated into the Dave Holden gestalt. He'd been raised from the dead. The suit and tie, the neat, machinelike precision of these outward manifestations, also part of that. He had been dead in the hospital, dead before he got there, dead as soon as he'd been a messy piece of meat bleeding around a smoking hole at its center. That weak, sloppy thing in the hospital bed, leaking fluids, pinned naked by plastic tubes and hoses-that hadn't been him, the real Dave Holden.
He spread his hands on his knees, studied as though for the first time. Like scalpels, he mused. Not just the hands, but everything about him. A cutting instrument, sterile out of the autoclave. Putting the blade in blade runner. Thatwas why he'd been so good at his job, at hunting down and retiring replicants: he'd out-machined them. He'd beaten out all the other blade runners as well, like that whiner Deckard; he'd gone all the way around the Curve and come out the other side. Come out as something… other than human. Until Kowalski..
'You still stewing about that? Getting blown away by some big moron?' Batty had read his thoughts, as though his eyes were gauges like those on the big machines he'd been hooked up to. 'Get over it.' Shrugged, smiling. 'Or don't.'
'No…' Holden slowly shook his head. 'I'm just… wondering.' He noticed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter sitting out on a table between them; whether they were Batty's or for him, he didn't know. 'You mind?' He leaned forward and took the pack.
An expression of mild distaste. 'You know you'll have to change your filter — the one inside you — twice as often, if you start that up again.'
'It's worth it.' He leaned back and exhaled, then studied the drift of blue smoke above him. The nicotine seeping into his machine-aerated blood made him feel even more efficient and confident, as though all the tiny valves inside had been fed drops of lubricating oil. His old self. 'Definitely.'
'Whatever.' Batty's smile returned. 'So what was it you were wondering?'
He knew he had to be cautious. The one more thing he would have liked to have had restored to him was his big black hammer of a weapon. He could see the bulge and the lopsided tug of weight inside the black leather jacket that indicated Batty was packing.
'Oh…' Holden glanced around at the buckling prefab walls. A collection of photos torn from magazines, nudes and tropical vistas, all equally unlikely, rustled in the hot dry wind seeping in through the seams. 'You know. Like what the hell is this place?'
'Didn't you see the sign when they wheeled you in? It's the Reclamation Center.'
'Never heard of it.'
'Of course not,' said Batty. 'It wouldn't be a top-secret police installation if some schmuck like you knew about it.'
'Looks to me like they're just pulling parts off some old trashed-out police vehicles.' He tilted his head toward the window with its view of the wrecking yard beyond the fence. 'What's so top secret about that?'
'Are you kidding?' Batty emitted a sharp barking laugh. 'You know what happens to your appropriations money if the state or the feds find out you're recycling your rolling stock? Shit-they'll cut you off without a dime. Besides…' A shrug. 'Keep something like this secret, makes it that much easier to keep the other stuff they do here under wraps. Stuff like cramming a nice new set of pumping gear inside you.' He jabbed an index finger toward Holden. 'You gotta admit, the folks out here have taken good care of you.'
'The people at the hospital — where I was before — they were supposed to be taking care of me.'
'That's true.' Batty's smile grew wider, wicked with delight. 'Like I said, a lot depends upon knowing who
