The Runner (PDF download link)
Gaff rubbed his aching leg with one hand as he guided the dark blue Spinner through a man-made valley of tall buildings with the other.
Beside him in the passenger seat, Deckard stared out his rain-streaked window across Los Angeles. Even now, in the persistent showers and bleak gathering darkness, it was a beautiful view. Without turning away from the window, he spoke, breaking the silence. “You think it’s a fool’s dream . . . don’t you?”
Having thought silently for a moment, Gaff responded carefully in the blended mishmash city-speak language of the streets, “I think it’s good to have dreams, but this one is quite ambitious. You really want a horse? They’ve been nearly extinct for years. Even synthetic ones are outrageously expensive.”
Both men fell silent.
Deckard’s neighbor had come home with a synthetic horse several months ago, and he had been dreaming of them ever since. His own synthetic sheep, for which he had worked very hard and waited very patiently, was nice and he knew he should have been happy with it, but nonetheless he found wanting a horse. The discouragement he wore on his face reflected in the window glass.
Gaff began the Spinner’s descent toward the streets below, “I just don’t see how owning a horse is realistic. Real ones are extremely rare, and on your salary, even for a synthetic one, you might as well be dreaming of owning a Centaur or a Unicorn, my good man. You have about as much chance of obtaining those mythical beasts as you do your horse. Men have sought those elusive creatures for centuries and never found them because they do not exist. If they did, and anyone were lucky enough to find anything so rare, they would run away with it and never come back. I’ve come to think that the odds of finding the right woman is in that mythological category as well.”
Deckard looked across to Gaff and nodded knowingly as the vehicle touched down on the street.
Cold eyes stared back at him as his door raised, folding forward. He pulled the collar of his coat up and said nothing as he stepped out into the rain. The door lowered again as the vehicle rose from the ground and raced away.
Deckard glanced back over his shoulder and watched the Spinner disappear into traffic as he walked into his apartment building. With any luck, the incessant moisture made that bastard’s bum leg stiffen up and hurt worse.
*
He walked into the still darkness of the cave-like apartment on feet aching with the mileage of the day. A barely audible electronic humming rose and fell rhythmically in the otherwise silent space. Twin lights in the ceiling above the bar momentarily switched on as he grabbed a glass and a bottle.
The warm light cascading down over him switched off as he walked away, pouring himself a drink and heading toward a comfortable spot on the worn sofa. He sat slowly, his sore, tired body sinking gradually down into the deep cushions.
He began unlacing his shoes with one hand as he sipped his whiskey from the heavy, squared glass in the other. The events of the past few weeks raced through his mind as he took another sip from the glass, eyes staring unfocused into nothingness and he placed the half empty bottle on the low coffee table.
The warmth of the liquor burned in his chest in sharp contrast to the chill on his skin as he ran his free hand over his face, up over his forehead and back through damp hair. The bones of his neck popped as he rotated his head slowly, and leaned back further into the cushion.
Promise of a new life and a new start offworld blared outside his window, and bright floodlights streamed in through the blinds as a slow-moving, neon-laden advertisement blimp passed by, blaring a neon-laden advertisement.
The sound of rain falling and the dancing spatter of water on his balcony and windows made his dim apartment seem all the more comforting.
In his line of work, being outside, exposed and among the masses left behind here on Earth, rain was an occupational hazard, and it never seemed to stop anymore, he thought. Regardless, Blade Runners endured whatever was necessary to track and retire their mark.
Deckard took another mouthful of the amber whiskey and swallowed as he wondered what his soon-to-be ex-wife, Iran, was doing across town in their home, his home. He wondered if she was taking care of his synthetic sheep. Probably not.
After years of depression and dependence on the mood organ, she had announced that she could no longer bear to live with him. The blood he came home with on his clothes at the end of the day weighed heavily on her. She was leaving him for a rich, off-world entrepreneur.
His attempts to calm her by assuring her it wasn’t real blood, only Replicant blood, hadn’t made things any better. Like it or not, “Retiring” illegal Replicants found on Earth was his job. In the end she saw him as little more than a killer, and she had had enough.
He was sure she had been using their time apart to pack and get her papers in order for her emigration, if she wasn’t gone already. He didn’t know and didn’t care. He had pushed the memories of their life together to the back of his mind.
The dreams of one day owning a real animal weren’t practical, he knew that. Now that he was alone and entertained thoughts of possibly quitting his job, that dream of another animal would never happen.
He marveled at how the need for his job had been born from the push of progress in the development of synthetic life. The Tyrell Corporation had been making Replicants for years, but only in the leap forward seen in the last 3 generations had they become so indistinguishable from humans that specific testing had to be developed to discern one from the other.
The Voight-Kampf empathy test was the latest in a line of detection tools. Dave Holden, he himself, and others in the Rep Detect unit used it as a regular part of their job, but they all had their doubts as to how long it would remain effective with the new advances in the Nexus line.
Replicants were manufactured on Earth and sent to the off-world colonies either as support personnel for the labor forces creating new colony infrastructures, various combat teams or military units settling new areas, or as pleasure models in one of several levels of entertainment services. It all depended on their pre-determined genetic coding. No matter what their individual destinies were, in the end, all were manufactured slaves.
He squeezed his eyes shut hard and then relaxed his face. A headache had inconveniently settled piercingly behind his left eye, and the slight spasming of the lower lid had been annoying him for hours now. He wiped his free hand over it in an attempt to end the nearly imperceptible tremor.
As long as Replicants were hard at work, or play, or whatever it was they were designed for, he didn’t care how many were running around the galaxy. It was only when they went off the deep end, fleeing the colonies and making their way back to Earth that they became his problem.
Replicants were illegal on Earth, and usually if they had made it this far, some or many had died along their path.
He himself was two weeks off the mood organ, and he was pleased with his decision to quit. While the mood organ was a nice device to have for synthesizing the emotions and moods that accompany pleasure or happiness simply by dialing up that mood, it could be a destructive tool as well.
His wife had used the infernal device to amplify her unhappiness and depression. Even when he had tried to secretly intervene and dial in a day of happiness for her, she had discovered the change and reset it for despair.
Given his current life circumstances, he was already running the gamut of real moods and emotions without needing the haze of synthetically generated feelings crowding out and numbing him to those real ones already there. He pressed his cool drink glass to his left eye and stared through the whiskey at his distorted apartment.
He needed to be more in touch with those natural moods and feelings in his head if he ever had any hope of moving on with his life. He moved the glass aside, momentarily looking at the room, then put it back, again altering the view.
Images from the day flashed across his now-closed lids as he finished off the last swallow of whiskey. These images stuck in his head . . . of all the faces he had looked into while searching, and all the strange looks he had gotten from people passing by as he talked to Holden on his departmental phone.
All personal cell phones and other private communication devices had been rendered useless back in 2015 when the last of the remaining commercial cellular communication satellites had slipped out of their deteriorating low earth orbits and burned up in the atmosphere.
The major communication companies had all moved along with the world government to the colonies, so no one remained behind to launch anything new for private use. The only satellites that remained in their higher, more stable orbits were for standardized vid-phone service and official use only.
Most everyone left behind on Earth had a vid-phone in their homes and they were readily available on the streets in the remaining populated cities. Global communication had become less important now anyway as more and more people emigrated off-world, and those left behind were leaving the more remote regions and gathering together in communities of diversely mixed cultures.
Now, slipping deeper into the seductive arms of unconsciousness, Deckard's fingers relaxed just enough to allow the squared glass tumbler to gradually slide from his grip and fall silently to the sofa beside him.
* * *
Across the empty voids of space, far away from Earth and the deepening slumber of Rick Deckard, Roy Batty's chest rose and fell quickly, his breathing heavy.
Perspiration glistened on his skin as he peered with ice blue eyes through the port to the stars outside the station. He still couldn't get a good view of the fleet that had fired on them, but he rationalized that if the attack was sustained, it could be just the distraction he and the others needed to put his plan in motion.
If they could just get to Earth and unlock more time, they could slip away unnoticed into the uninhabited regions, and perhaps one day, when the last people either emigrated or died off, they might inherit the remains of the planet, depleted as it was, as a place to call theirs.
There was another port beyond the launch bays, he remembered, as he peered through his own reflection in the glass to the emptiness of space beyond; emptiness echoed in his heart and mind. His eyes dropped slightly, deep in thought, feeling that emptiness. Just after his incept date, he had felt invincible, as if nothing could stand in his way. Now, as he neared the end of his lifespan, the emptiness and dread were two new feelings his Replicant slave mind was cataloguing and analyzing.
The thumb on his right hand quivered and spasmed slightly as he thought of his looming end. He had to break away and make a way back to Tyrell, to extend his lifespan beyond the current longevity projections. He dreamed of actually directing the course of his own life, making it back to Earth was the first step toward making these things reality.
In order for that to happen, humans that stood in his way would have to die. Then, as if the thoughts simply evaporated, he turned abruptly, giggling like a three year old, and raced off down the gantry past the launch bays heading for a better view out the next port.
* * *
A dirigible floated silently across the dark mid-morning sky, searchlights slowly sweeping over the ashen city below as it splashed its enticingly vibrant, multi-colored advertisement of life in the offworld colonies. Messages that spoke of emigration to a new life blared down from the bright display, repeating over and over in several languages as it drifted along, trolling for takers.
Steady rain fell from far above onto the shadowy, already-drenched form crouching in the filth-ridden alley. It hid between two of the many near-empty, hundred-plus story buildings that made up much of what was left of the decaying downtown area. It was waiting . . . watching.
Crowds of people made their way by on the main street, huddled beneath their umbrellas, glow-rods dimly illuminating their features as they passed. Cars and buses moved through the streets and the occasional Spinner slid past overhead as the last remaining citizens of Los Angeles plodded through their day.
*
Through the smog and murk, the outline of the distant pyramid-shaped buildings of the Tyrell Corporation were barely discernable from the sky. Bright lights on their roofs aimed upward into the dark sky were softly diffused by the atmospheric moisture. If those ziggurats or pyramids mimicked the ancient Egyptian structures, then Eldon Tyrell was surely the pharaoh that ruled the Tyrell Empire. They had never met, but Deckard knew him to be a man of great power. When he spoke, the police jumped, even Bryant, and Bryant didn’t move, let alone jump, for anyone. He wondered why as he raced along the old freeway.
Veering right, he exited the near-empty remnants of the overgrown highway, heading for the more densely populated surface streets of the downtown area. Passing several side streets of no particular interest to him, at last he made a slow turn onto a very congested street that served as an inner city market.
Deckard eased his car into an empty space along the curb and switched off the power. He buttoned the collar of his trench coat across his throat, opened the door and stepped out to the sidewalk. The door closed, and he listened for the small click of the lock, before making his way past a man walking with a synthetic eagle on his shoulder.
Turning his head as the man passed, Deckard studied the incredible detail of the bird as it gripped the man’s shoulder tighter with sharp talons, nervously rustling its feathers. Then his eyes caught a momentary flash of the tell-tale copper-toned glint of the synthetic eagle’s eyes, and the otherwise implied and genetically designed nobility of the bird seemed somehow diminished.
Wings fluttered wildly, and the bird shifted its footing on the man’s shoulder, head turning sharply to follow Deckard as he moved along the sidewalk. Three old Asian men herding ostriches moved past him, and he was careful to step back to the wall, allowing the large birds to pass. The air was cold, and sweet tobacco smoke hung thick in the air as he made his way beneath an awning at the retro-electronics store. Rain water dripped from its edges as he stepped under it.
Buster Friendly was being broadcast on several dozen screens in the display window. All the antique televisions had slightly differing images. Some were too green, some too purple, several had static invading their distorted edges, while still other screens rolled and flickered randomly.
None had a decent picture, he thought, as he worked his way past the window toward the noodle stand at the corner, but then again maybe that was part of their quaint charm. Patrons seated at the small street-side vendor's counter were enjoying hot broth, noodles, fish heads and other questionable foods under the deathly pale green glare of fluorescent lighting.
Eventually he made his way to an open space under the neon dragon at the end of the counter that stuck out into the mouth of the alley. The warmth of the steamy kitchen washed over his cold face as he looked at the offering of food choices and pointed to a picture, "Noodles. Large . . . and a Tsing Tao beer."
The old Asian woman behind the counter nodded slightly and turned to prepare the food as Deckard glanced left, then right at the relatively empty street. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the sidewalk.
It was dark beneath the portico of the boarded up entrance of the Bradbury building. This area had a fair amount of life during the day, but come nightfall, it was as deserted as any street in Washington D.C. or New York City.
The sound of the beer bottle being placed on the counter brought his attention back to the moment. His bowl of noodles immediately followed the pale beer. He pulled out several bills and placed them in the old woman's hand, hoping it was enough. She smiled, nodding as she moved off toward the next customer.
A long swallow of the cold beer washed down his throat as his phone rang. He flipped it open and lowered the bottle, answering, "This is Deckard". His chopsticks grabbed at some noodles in the bowl, and he lifted them to his mouth as he heard Bryant’s voice on the other end of the line.
"Deck, we just got a tip that there’s a skinjob somewhere in your vicinity."
Deckard glanced around, noodles hanging from his lips. He hated that slang term, “skinjob” in place of Replicant. He also had no use for the people that used it. In history books, Bryant was one of those cops that used to call black men “Niggers”.
He sucked the noodles in slowly as Bryant continued. "This one’s a Nexus 6, pal. There won't be time for a VK test. You'll be lucky to retire it at all."
He imagined his fat boss sitting behind his little desk in his little office. "6? New generation?" He glanced around the street again.
"Yeah. Tyrell's been busy, and this wave's even harder to identify than the last."
Deckard looked down the street past the bio-recycling vehicle slowly moving his way, and caught sight of the Tyrell Corporate pyramids in the distance.
"Holden's on the way, Deck, don't be an asshole. Don’t try to engage it on your own. None of us have had to deal with this generation yet, but from the fact sheets I've just been reading, it's gonna be a real bitch. This one’s part of a combat group from the frontier’s offensive line. The commanding officer said it walked away from the slave barracks last week, gunned down two guards and stole a small supply ship. It landed in the shipyards out near Marina Del Ray two days ago. Killed the dock attendant and cryo service tech that came out to dump the liquid nitrogen from the ship."
"Male or female?" asked Deckard.
Static crackled back over his receiver, and then Bryant's voice. "Male."
“Any idea what it looks like?”
“I’m sending the scan I made from the spec sheets to your phone now.”
"Thanks. Deckard out" he said as Bryant continued talking. He opened the data screen on the phone as the transmitted scan unfurled. It was a bad original picture to begin with, but the rough scan and phone transfer had even further degraded it.
He flipped the phone closed. The image was useless to him. He would have to “retire” this Replicant solely based on his experience from doing so to others in the past. He knew what to look for, but this time it would have to be without the aid of the VK test or a visual ID. What if he retired a human by accident?
This job was becoming less and less black and white as Tyrell made his damned Replicants more and more human. ‘More Human than Human’ was their company motto. His eyes scanned the street carefully as he swallowed more beer, and fed more noodles into this mouth, trying to remain calm and appear inconspicuous as he began to feel his stomach flutter and adrenaline involuntarily pumped into this bloodstream.
His heart rate increased. He could see the pulsing in the corners of his vision and hear it in his ears as his body prepared for a possible encounter.
As he drank the last of the beer, he unsnapped the guard strap on the imitation leather holster under his left arm and switched on the power to his Plager Katsumate Series D blaster. The last of the noodles and broth slipped into his mouth from the raised bowl, and he placed it on the counter, stepping away into the rain, hoping to spot the Replicant as it tried desperately to be invisible.
His eyes swept over the darkened alley beside the Bradbury as he moved past it, dissecting every shadow and glimmer, and he saw something. It was faint, and only for an instant, but a definite copper-colored retinal reflection from a pair of blinking eyes had come from something hiding behind a trash dumpster.
Human and animal retinas reflected red or green, depending on the source light. Replicant retinas always reflected in a dull, coppery tone. It was just a quirk of the genetically engineered eyes. He hoped he had gotten lucky, and continued past the alley toward the portico so as not to arouse suspicion.
As soon as he disappeared from sight of the alley, the dark form behind the dumpster jumped from its' hiding place and ran deeper into the alley, searching for a way out. It jumped up, grabbing the rusted iron steps of an ancient fire escape hanging overhead, pulling it down to the pavement. Wasting no time, it raced up the stairs and began the climb up the side of the Bradbury.
Deckard eased his head around the corner, looking toward the dumpster. Bags were now strewn all over the wet pavement and whatever had been hiding was gone. He drew his gun and rounded the corner, catching sight of the fleeing Replicant several floors above, ascending the black metal ladders. He pulled out his phone and ran down the dark alley toward the fire escape as he voice-dialed Dave Holden.
The rain continued to fall as he jumped up and began climbing the fire escape. The Replicant was at least three levels above when Deckard leaned out as far as he could without falling and brought his gun up, squeezing off a shot at the dark figure.
The bricks beside the Replicant’s head burst in a shower of reddish dust as the bullet narrowly missed. The fleeing figure frantically looked around, then abruptly kicked in a window and slipped inside the building.
Deckard kept coming up the stairs as a shower of glass shards fell to the pavement below.
Raindrops bounced off the metal grating as he carefully ascended to the level with the broken window. Torn, yellowed curtains inside the jagged opening blew slightly, suspended on the cool air from outside. Deckard backed up to the brick wall beside the broken pane, gun raised, as Holden’s Spinner descended from above.
He closed his eyes for a second, feeling the raindrops landing on his hair and face; sliding down his cheek; wet between his finger and the trigger. His friend piloted the vehicle down to the opposite side of the landing where Deckard waited. It stopped its descent, then rotated until the pilot’s door, which was now folding open, was aligned with the edge of the landing. He watched as Holden stepped precariously out of the hovering vehicle and took up a position opposite him on the other side of the window, gun drawn.
Deckard looked inside the broken window, quickly retreating behind the brick. “It’s clear. You go, I’ll cover you.”
He pointed his gun into the room as Holden nodded and reached inside to unlatch the window. It was old and too stuck to properly open. Carefully, he stepped one leg through the jagged opening into the inky darkness.
Deckard raised his weapon and followed.
The room was very dark and the air was thick with dust. Shabby carpeting and padding had been ripped up in strips and left in piles in the corner. Dave moved ahead toward the hallway outside the door as a shadow moved in Deckard’s peripheral vision.
He was turning his head to see what it was when the board in the Replicants hand slammed into his face with incredible force, breaking his nose and spewing blood across the room. A shot rang out as he reflexively squeezed the trigger while falling backward to the floor.
Holden spun around firing as Deckard spit out several teeth. Two shots hit the dark figure, but it still moved with incredible speed and strength. It was like nothing either man had seen before in a Replicant.
Blurring through the air, the bloody board again found its mark across the side of Dave’s skull. It knocked him into the wall where he managed to fire one last shot through the heart of his attacker before slumping unconscious to the floor.
The Replicant was thrown back against the wall, where he slowly slid to a crouched position. A glistening, bloody trail was smeared down the discolored paint on the wall behind him.
A dazed Deckard, with dust from the floor now smeared across his wet, bloodied face and hair, rolled his head over to look at the injured Replicant and noticed that his synthetic sheep was now in the room, grazing on invisible grass near the corner.
Blood trickled into his eye. He blinked it away and looked again. The sheep raised its head and bleated loudly as a stunning white Unicorn crossed behind it and exited into the hallway, followed by a horse.
A dirigible slowly moved past the building, searchlights streaming in through the window, its recorded message blaring, “A new life awaits your wife in the Off-World colonies . . . The chance to begin again without you in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”
Like Holden, he finally passed out completely, the last words of the advertisement lost in the haze. A streak of lightning flashed and immediate thunder immediately cracked in the dark skies outside the building.
*
A sharp crack of thunder startled him, and Deckard’s eyes flew open. He rubbed his eyes, realizing the glass he had been drinking from had fallen on the cushion beside him. Lightning flashed again outside his window as he picked up the heavy glass, placing it on the coffee table.
The headache hadn’t gotten any better, he thought to himself as he rubbed his left eye and forehead. What a dream he had been having. Nexus 6? Tyrell’s never going to stop making those damned Replicants, he thought.
As the leaps forward in the technologies were made, the detection tests and their results were becoming more and more inconclusive, making his work that much more difficult and dangerous. There had to be something else he could do.
Maybe he could go offworld and sell high-end animals . . . something . . . anything. There had to be something less nerve-wracking and stressful than this. The job had driven his wife away, and to top it off, he had seen the gimp, Gaff, nosing around Bryant’s office, asking questions about joining the Blade Runner unit, but he’d never make it with a bum leg.
He was fed up with the job, all of it. In his frustration he pulled out his phone and started dialing Bryant’s number to quit. Then he stopped himself and closed the phone, pressing it against his forehead just over his closed eyes. He blew out a breath and tossed the phone on the table beside the bottle.
The cushions beneath him were still warm from the heat of his body as he lay back down, burying his face in one and pulling the draped blanket from the back of the sofa down across his shoulders. He descended through murky thoughts of Egyptian pyramids as sleep overcame him once again.
* * *
(text edited 2-22-2023)
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