Thanks to teshumai for betaing.
I enjoyed your prompts, janie_tangerine; hopefully this isn't too bleak!
"Do you feel like the sum of your cells? Cells."
"Cells," Officer K repeats.
"What's the first thing you can remember? Cells."
"Cells."
"Does blood loss make you faint? Cells."
"Cells."
The computer monitors the responses as Corey continues reciting from his script. "Do you believe the galaxies are interlinked? Interlinked."
For a moment Officer K flinches as if he's attempting to justify a yes/no answer, but quickly echoes, "Interlinked."
"Have you ever been jealous of animals? Interlinked."
"Interlinked."
"What suggestions do you have for improving department efficiency? Interlinked."
"Interlinked."
Corey nods, and K exhales while the computer finishes plotting his diagnostics. It only takes a moment before Corey glances over at the screen. "You're within baseline."
"Thank you," K says. "May I see my latest readings?"
Corey pauses. He doesn't think there's anything forbidding him to share biometric data with its subject, but it's not a very common request. "I suppose."
He calls up a holographic projection of the data, and K squints as if dimming his eyes from its glare against the white walls. "Trend lines?"
"I said. You're within baseline."
"It says I'm at fifty-second percentile now. Last year I was at forty-sixth."
"That's good. Admirably consistent."
"So the raw data should be about the same?"
Corey hesitates, then carries on. "Your baseline, Officer, isn't a fixed value. There's to be some, ah, aging effects and normal wear and tear expected. As you gain field experience, surely your..." Not mental acuity? "Instincts have sharpened even as your reaction time has slowed."
"Lieutenant Joshi says I'm still in my prime." It's difficult to tell whether he's joking.
"It's not as simple as a linear extrapolation, there's a comparison across your entire cohort to be made. All you need to know is that you're perfectly healthy and fit for service."
K glowers momentarily, but then nods. "Thank you."
"Of course," says Corey, "and don't forget to see us immediately if you have any concerns."
K exits quickly. Something on his latest case that had him rattled, wanting to make sure he was up to par? Corey can't tell.
It's a much longer conversation than he usually has with the replicants he interviews, and as much as it makes him uneasy, he has to admit he's thankful for it. Because some part of him fears, without the surprise of replicants wanting to call up their charts, most of the work he does—reading scripts, waiting for answers, typing in ID codes—could be done by a computer.
"No man can serve two masters," Wallace muses, when he's placed his eyes on for the afternoon and glanced over at Luv. "You cannot serve God and wealth."
"Are those debugging instructions?" she asks. "How to resolve conflicting code?"
"Humans who scrape and struggle for every penny will be prisoners of their own fear. But you, who can summon brothers and sisters of your own design, will not be tempted by the lure of mammon if all you ever want is built and grown within the same scheme, from genesis to oblivion. It is you who will inherit the stars."
When she sees a replicant from the outside, it's disappointing how human he looks. Officer K is ostensibly there on a LAPD case, but she can't help but probe him to see if Wallace is onto something. "Do they pay you well?"
He raises his eyebrows. "That's a bit of a—private matter, isn't it?"
"I mean, you must sleep, eat, somewhere."
K doesn't seem to be in the mood to talk about his living conditions. "I can afford chicken and waffles downtown every once in a while, if that's what you mean."
All right, so maybe everyone else really is as bizarre as Wallace makes them out to be. "Fascinating."
"The, uh, internal discounts are also appreciated."
"Oh?" Wallace has never been particularly clear about where the Joi units will fit into the off-world colonization plan. Just a distraction for those unfortunate enough to remain Earthside? Will there be male equivalents?
"It gets to be lonely. I'm sure you understand."
Luv stares blankly. "I have a very busy life here."
"I see." K waves at the hundreds and hundreds of silent boxes. "These must take plenty of effort to...maintain."
"Even if I was dissatisfied, the power to make a change is wholly mine. I would expect nothing less from a creation full of such potential as," she shrugs, "myself."
K frowns. "I understand."
"Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"Not yet," K says. "Let me follow up with this ID number, and I'll get back to you."
Part of her imagines him failing, and returning to seek out her aid, acknowledging her talents. But another part of her imagines him succeeding at a task she cannot yet fathom, rising above whatever it is Wallace has envisioned, charting his own course beyond the city limits one ancient record at a time.
Mariette has a love immense and inconstant, wild and dark. She adores the city, in all its precipitous downpours and dazzling images. It has been called a city of angels, a mission to a queen in unseen heavens, a crossing place for forging stories out of sounds and images, and if it is all of these or none today, it captivates her all the same.
She thinks she remembers making snow angels on a hillside somewhere far from the metropolis, lying on her back and waving until a fresh snowfall covered the tracks where she'd been. Of course it had never happened. She had never been young and if the world had ever been that quiet and undisturbed, it was part of myth, before the lights flickered and were restored. Still, it makes a good story.
Her friends are content to linger in the same marketplaces week in and week out, trusting that the passers-by will change. They look to cheer up the downcast commuters who find it a chore to come and go in the common squares, muttering in one language at a time and hoping not to shuffle that way again. Mariette would as soon familiarize herself with the regulars, who thrill to the creole of Cityspeak, bartering and badgering and throwing out bargains five words at a time. They swear, too, but she stops taking offense after the flow of phonemes becomes more of a novelty than a deliberate insult. Listen at certain corners and you're likely to hear strings of choice epithets that have never before been concatenated.
And given the choice, she'd rather rent a flyer and explore different neighborhoods, or what used to be different neighborhoods before generations of highways and weatherproof constructions homogenized them. Buried behind layers of eyeball-searing advertisements are the names of bygone benefactors, the Wallaces of their day—philanthropic families with a large enough reach might touch every corner of the city—and these, too, live in her mental map even though hail occasionally obscures them. And if, amid her travels, she should happen to meet a band of other replicants, who are angry and ancient and gazing beyond the clouds, and her explorations tend to become less aimless and at odder hours, at others' beck and call? Well, her friends don't think anything of it. She's always on the move.
When she meets Officer K she is unafraid. The Blade Runners are part of the city's past, as well, and despite all she has seen she is still young; she does not think anyone is in a hurry to retire her. She does fear for the underground, but then, she has been underground and up bunker hills and everywhere in between. If she's the one whose sinuous path they found, it means they're a long, long way from catching Freysa or the others.
He shows her a picture, and she's entranced all the more. Not just by him, but by the window into the past. A living tree? There? If there are mysteries even she has not seen, in all her travels, the man who carries them might be the most fascinating of all.
When an LAPD officer walks into her room, Dr. Ana Stelline figures she's in for it.
She hadn't entirely planned on breaking the law; it had just sort of happened. Disobedience was, in its own twisted way, a sort of freedom, and she has been chafing and seeking freedom all her life. In the orphanage, she spent hours on end forging electronics with her hands, but all to fit the mold someone else designed, just like the children to her left and right. There was nothing to create of her own. The staff was stretched too thin to keep track of the bigger kids acting out when their disobedience let them bully the tiny and helpless ones. The smaller ones' slacking off would only earn them yells to get back to work.
Inside her new home, she was fussed over and feared for, denied the sky. She began to read, recognizing it was a longer-lasting technology than digital data that had been destroyed in the blackout, and let her mind wander to distant places and times while resigning herself to her body's frailty. Common threads blurred into one another, and her imagination created fanciful detours to what might have been and what might yet be.
An accredited scientist and leader in her field, still she remained walled behind glass, and still her professional life held more questions than answers. Of course she had the proficiency to create memories, but her clients couldn't provide a compelling justification. Why did replicants need a past? Could they not act like humans unless they had decades worth of human experience woven within their minds? Did some part of them prefer to have history to fall back on? Was it more comforting for their human employers themselves to know they were interacting with entities more similar to them?
No explanation was given, and for all her boundless imagination, no answer could satisfy her. Ana pushed back, seeking freedom the only way she could find it, and mingled her own past into the new Nexuses. It was not much, and less of it pleasant, but she had survived to become someone who could dream and create, even inside a cage. Perhaps they, too, could overcome what bound them.
Officer K seems to be her comeuppance, but she vows to not break, not yet. She's come too far to be scared by the law. So she fends off his questions, only to find that he's not quite on a case, not quite there out of scientific curiosity.
Then she's peering into someone's past. It feels uncomfortably intimate, not the sort of thing she would do with a human unasked for, but she's serving—okay, evading—the law, and as soon as she's plunged in she turns away because it's not the officer's past at all.
Joe—Deckard isn't going to call the kid "Officer K," no matter what he thinks of himself—paces back to the piano room. Maybe it was a better idea to sit in a place without so many electronic sound effects cutting in and out.
"Do you play?" he asks.
"Not well," Deckard says, which is the truth.
Joe stares at a couple of the keys as if they're about to explode. LAPD threat analysis must really have gone downhill fast.
"Do you?"
"No," Joe says quickly. "No, uh, that's not my scene. Don't think a piano would last very long in my neighborhood anyway."
Deckard nods. "There are some advantages to rural life."
"Nice, if you like radioactivity."
Deckard looks over at the piano, then back at Joe. "Rachael, um, she—"
"You don't have to talk about it," K rushes.
"It's all right," Deckard says. "She played well, but not too often. Wanted to work on learning other things. Things that she knew were her own…discoveries."
"The bees? Those aren't hers, are they?"
In spite of himself, Deckard laughs. "Not directly. No, there were plenty of surprises, and—she wanted to keep learning, that's all."
"And then she left. To go play her part."
"I left, kid, don't get sentimental."
Joe nods.
"I'm sure she kept on testing the limits, right till the end. Would have driven her host up the wall."
"I'm sorry I never got to ask him," Joe admits. "To understand."
"I'm sorry too."
Before either of them can get too emotional, Joe paces over to the piano bench, opens it up, pages through the papers inside. "More light reading?"
"Sheet music. I know enough to know it's seven letters and it's not a secret code."
Joe drops it onto the piano, sneezing at the ensuing dust cloud. "Fascinating."
"Rachael always said if it spelled D-E-A-D it's a chord progression and not an omen."
"I've never known a replicant to get far believing in omens."
"Most replicants I've known don't get far," says Deckard. "The ones that did, they believed in something."
"We're Blade Runners," K protests. "We have a sampling bias."
"That's enough of that," Deckard says. "Time for another drink."
There's a lot to be said for having a guest to serve drinks to. Talking to himself, pouring out a drink and randomizing the jukebox, had gotten old after a month or so. Of course, K is too young to recognize what half of the jukebox and three-quarters of the drink labels are. Las Vegas is the city of radioactivity to him, if anything.
Maybe now it can be the city of bees. Two of them know about it, now, the colony quietly building its sweetness in a pattern of cells.
The snow continues to fall. He stood here just days before and marvelled at touching it as a human born. Now, without the strength to stand, he trembles at its descent, feeling it again as a replicant.
The cold pierces him inside and out, but at last his pain fades, and he can rise under his own power. Another form is walking over to him from across the street, snow melting under his steps. The man's body looks old, the stark white of his hair a contrast to his blue eyes. But what does any of that mean when aging can be accelerated and even memories can be lies? Or truths, shared throughout the world?
"What might I call you?" the man asks.
He thinks. "Officer" is right out. He isn't a "Joe" either. That was an echo of a sales pitch, a machine trying to work its way into his good graces. "Just K is fine."
"It is an honor to meet you, just K."
"Thank you." For some reason he can't put his finger on, he feels safe. Perhaps it's just that this man seems too...outdated to be one of Wallace's thugs. Not even one of the new replicants; the corporation preferred sleek curves, not angular jawbones like this stranger. "I'm sorry, but if you're with Freysa, I won't tell you anything." A moment ago, he had been ready to die rather than betray the newfound family reuniting within the building behind him. That resolve is still there, but with his dawning strength comes an unsettled sensation. What happens now?
"There's nothing I need you to share." He forces a smile that's bright but fleeting—unused to joy, but practicing more day by day.
"Why are you here?"
"As I said. It is an honor to meet you; you have learned more of freedom and selflessness than many people do in a lifetime." He squints, as if trying to focus through the snow. "You will serve as an example for those who come after you, even if not in the most direct way. Even as you inspire those who came before."
"Came before? I don't understand."
"Did you think this was the end of your discoveries? Information is never lost, but always carried forward. Your memories are your own now, but those of us who fought for a place in this world would hear you share them. Just as someday, you might learn from the children of planets yet unseen."
K shakes his head, barely taking it in. "I thought I'd seen enough miracles for one lifetime."
The old man laughs quietly. "You have, K. And here is another."
K starts following the replicant's snowprints, and beyond the city, thinks he can make out a stand of trees.