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.”
“That’d be a handy thing to have.” Deckard heard the sourness in his own voice. “If you were the police. Like a shopping list. You could just go out and ice them one by one, without all that tedious work of tracking them down.
How convenient.”
“Sure-except why would the police be interested at all?” Batty’s voice went back into its cool, logical mode. “You should try to remember what I’ve already told you. The disguises that Isidore gave to the escaped replicants were complete—even to the replicants themselves. You got that, Deckard? The escaped replicants on Earth don’t even know that that’s what they are. They think they’re human—and they might as well be, since none of the police’s empathy tests and Voigt-Kampff machines can show otherwise. The escaped replicants’ disguises are complete, perfect, and absolute—just the way that Isidore planned it. He was one smart guy, no matter what you might think of him. The way Isidore set it up, the replicants hiding out on Earth can’t even give themselves away to anybody who might be trying to hunt them down. And you know-all cops know—that’s the number-one way people get caught. They give themselves away. They know who they are-what they are—and it’s too much for them to keep bottled up inside. They want to be caught; they do all the little things, the mistakes, the coming out into the open, all that insures that somebody like you will find them. And end the chase the only way it can be ended. By death.” The voice lowered. “Even that last batch you hunted down, Deckard, back in L.A—the replicant that was based on me, and the Kowalski replicant, and Zhora and Pris—they knew who and what they were, and it didn’t help them. The truth doesn’t set you free, Deckard. It dooms you. That batch screwed up, they didn’t go to the Van Nuys Pet Hospital and get themselves disguised by Isidore; they had some other agenda going for them, besides their own survival. That’s the only reason you were able to find them at all. Not because you were able to tell that they were replicants. But because they still knew.”
They run toward death. The bleak truth. And Death, in the form of Rick Deckard or Dave Holden or any other blackgunned official assassin, ran toward them as fast, or just simply waited for them to come and be killed. What did it matter anyway to creatures with four-year life spans? To-morrow or the next day, or the day or the year after that, they would be iced just as surely by the flaws that Eldon Tyrell had designed into them.
Maybe—the thought had crept through Deckard before-maybe it was a relief For them, if not for himself.
“All right,” said Deckard, pulling himself from his grim musings. “But you didn’t answer your own question. If Isidore kept a list of all the escaped replicants he’d disguised, and that list was still around after he was offed-why wouldn’t the police want it?”
“What would be the point? Come on, Deckard, use your brain.” The briefcase’s voice struggled to remain patient. “The police get a list of names; so what?
They’re human—or they might as well be. They can’t be shown to be not human with the Voigt-Kampff machines and the empathy tests. They don’t know themselves that they’re escaped replicants. So what’s the danger in just letting them live? They’ll all drop dead pretty soon anyway, thanks to that four-year life span Tyrell built into them. They’re no threat to anyone—so why not just let the poor bastards live, at least as long as they’re going to? The police and the U.N. would just be making trouble for themselves by hunting the disguised replicants down-what kind of public relations is it to blow away people that everybody around them thinks are as human as they are? Do enough of that kind of shit, pretty soon you’d have real humans-whatever that means-worrying about whether they were going to be next. And then it would be the police who’d be in trouble.”
“So who does want it?” Deckard leaned back and regarded the briefcase. “I sure as hell didn’t-why send it to me?”
“The replicants, of course. Not the ones on Earth, the disguised ones—but the ones out there. Out in the stars; the insurrection. Isidore’s work at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital has a big payoff for them. Because of it, the insurrection has a ‘fifth column’ on Earth-replicants just like themselves, perfectly disguised, infiltrated through all levels of society. The only problem is that the disguised replicants don’t know that’s what they are. That’s where the list—the list that Isidore kept, the list that’s inside me—that’s where it comes in.”
Batty’s voice turned smug, as though pleased at the show of its own logic.
“The replicants’ insurrection already has a division of its own behind the enemy lines, right there on Earth. The insurrection just has to find them. Find them and tell them what they really are. Not humans as they thought, but replicants. And on the side of the insurrection.”
“Maybe.” Deckard shrugged. “Or maybe not. There might be some of these disguised replicants who like believing that they’re really human. They might not react too well to being told they’re not. If they believe this little revelation at all.”
“Different ones will react different ways.” Batty’s voice sounded unperturbed.
“Some might even just kill themselves rather than face the truth. Because they’ll know that it is the truth. The records that Isidore kept include not only the disguised replicants’ new identities but their old ones-who and what they were out in the colonies, before they escaped and made their way to Earth. And something even better —or at least more powerful—than that. The data on each disguised replicant includes the anamnetic trigger for that individual—a code phrase that Isidore planted into their new artificial memories that’ll bring the replicants to full, true consciousness. Once that trigger gets pulled-when a disguised replicant hears the big word—then the truth can’t be denied. That sucker’ll know just what he or she really is. They’ll all know. And they’ll know what side they should be on. Human or replicant.” The briefcase laughed, short and harsh. “It’ll be like what those last old die-hard Maoists used to say. One of their quotes from their little red book—you remember? ‘Give up illusion—prepare for struggle.’ Those poor bastards on Isidore’s list won’t even have any illusions to give up.”
Deckard remembered that line; he’d heard it a long time ago, back when he’d spent his time in the student warrens beneath Los Angeles. Or something like it, thought Deckard. The alternate, preferred version being “Give up struggle-prepare for illusion.” A holdover from the same historical epoch as the Maoists, the other war, the one
