Bladerunner A.D. 2049; Beauty Without Compromise - But Such Savage Beauty.

Deckard heard the stilletos sound sharply on the marble floor, he turned and saw her, in silhouette, as he had the first time. As she emerged into light she was as beautiful as ever. But it was all so long ago. It was disconcerting to be confronted with this re-creation, replica, of the Replicant he had loved. He was old now, he felt that truth in practically every movement of his constantly fatigued body, felt it in the sudden shortness of breath; the shortness of breath that had come on at the sight of her; because the sight of her was still enough to take his breath away. She had been re-created young, as he had known her, when he was also young. He examined her appearance closely, was reaching out to touch her hand, to slip his arm around her waist and hold her; in an instant, he decided, no, the appearance was not enough. He had come to know Rachel in so many other ways, as though she had been truly real. She had been the apex of all Tyrell's development, that had been halted after his death; if people didn't want Replicants that shoot at them, they didn't want them to appear to be too real, either.

Even though he knew, in his own skin, as we say now, (but, as the old saying used to have it, in his heart of hearts), everything Rachel was, came from Eldon Tyrell's ingenuity, Deckard had accepted it, much as you would accept the characteristics of a human lover as a combination of what they had been taught as a child, and what they had made of it as an adult. Rachel, nevertheless, seemed to have that other indefinable spark that made a person desireable. But Rachel had once been used as a gift to himself, Deckard, to seduce him, as an inducement, as a bribe, to have him 'look the other way...' as Tyrell's creations spread across the off-Earth bases, and across the Earth too; Tyrell had tried it with other Bladerunners, and it was a tactic that had worked; Tyrell offered the Bladerunners a time-limited love-doll. This re-creation of Rachel was an unwanted reminder of how he had been taken-in, he was lucky Tyrell had been killed, unless he would have been a bigger dupe, but... you can't choose who you love. In retrospect, after all these years, that was the worst of it.

When Wallace had taken over the production of Replicants, they had returned to the Pre-series. Slightly less of a complete iteration of human life, they always included something that was not quite right.

Deckard didn't want any more gifts, from Tyrell, or from Wallace.

'Her eyes were green,' he said simply, wearily, and turned away.

He felt the concussive shot, within the marble-lined chamber, as much as he heard it. He looked around and saw the gun in Love's hand.

'Must you kill everything?' he asked her.

'You did... when you were a Bladerunner,' replied Love, who wore her hair, and dressed, so much like Rachel had. 'You killed everything. You killed Replicants.'

'I did. Until I met Rachel... And Roy B. And until I learnt not to. She taught me that even these ersatz lives have value. He taught me that if a Replicant can value the life of a Bladerunner, perhaps even a tired, old, war-survivor like me, ought to value life again, as well.'

'Hardly an original lesson.'

'It was a valuable lesson to me, at the time. It was a post-war world, then; for most of us who had fought in it, and had survived, life was cheap. Knowing how easily we could have been killed during the war, knowing how cheap our own lives were, that we were all an expendable resource, gave us a low view of the lives of the Replicants. It was easy for us to be recruited after the war as Bladerunners. Rachel was part of my re-education to the essential truth that life must be valued for itself.'

'Wrong,' said Wallace looking down at the corpse of this other type of abortion. 'We checked the archives, she was anatomically correct in all details, and her eyes were dark brown with a slight green flecking; it is your memory that is faulty.'

'The Blackout caused...'

'We had paper records of the Nexus-6 series. From before the Blackout. You don't seem able to remember that this was when digital existed, but it was optional.'

Deckard glanced down at the corpse of the short-lived re-creation of Rachel. He felt nothing; after all, if they had made this one, they could make another at any time. He had become colder again, since her death, while she was bearing what ought not to have been possible; died with that small smile that she hardly ever smiled, looking down at her baby, at their baby. It was with this recollection, that he suddenly felt ferociously, savagely angry at both this hateful Replicant called Love, and her creator, Wallace. He saw in Love much of the same physical beauty he had seen in Rachel, and he also sensed the deep, indifferent chill within, all the Replicants had it below the socialised-layer. It was rather like the reptile-brain that sits at the base of the human brain, that part of the brain that still made 'man, carrion to man', as Edgar Allen Poe had once put it. He knew that Rachel had always had the same ability to kick-kill as Love had, but she had never used it, he knew that Rachel had the same ability to shoot him dead as casually as Love could do, but she had never used that ability either. At least, he corrected himself, not as far as he ever knew; but who knows how Tyrell had used her? and what he had commanded her to do, before they met.

Love demonstrated such savage beauty. Beauty without compromise, beauty without feeling. Killing without compromise, compassion, mercy or modesty. Too often, this was the Replicant way. How could it be otherwise? when all is said and done, it is just a thing, an object. Such savage, ugly, demeaning, useless beauty. And Love was the embodiment of all he had known during the war, the savagery of war, the ugliness of war; she embodied it all, except the beauty; but the inclusion of the physical beauty in her creation, alongside the savagery, seemed to twist the knife in his psyche, still, even after all these years. He'd seen so much of it, and was heartsick of it. It was this that had aged him, as much as the passage and weight of all the years since he and Rachel, had once...

He crouched down by the body of the re-creation of Rachel, felt a surge of tenderness for the suddenly killed creation, seeing it as he had, fortunately, never seen Rachel. The entry and exit point of the bullet was hidden from view by the way her hair had fallen. The flow of blood was also covered over by her lovely long hair. He thought for a moment that this re-creation really was Rachel, afterall it had been 'made from the same mold'. He touched the lips lightly with his fingertips.

'You shouldn't have done that,' he said to Wallace; meaning either he shouldn't have had Love shoot her, or he shouldn't have re-created her, or both.

'You always remember the first time you were with a Replicant? Hmmm?' Wallace asked. 'And you thought they'd never be another Rachel, is that it? How could that be so? Tyrell was a commercial enterprise, there were bound to be other Rachels. If the Nexus-6s hadn't turned out to be faulty, so deeply flawed, there would have been many, many more Rachels. "Beauty, without compromise" is our marketing slogan, as you must know, even if you do live out in one of the radiation zones - Why do you live in what is left of Las Vegas? We'd been looking for you in one of the abolitionist states further north. We don't produce the Nexus series anymore, of course, the prohibition was too much trouble - we followed a new line of development from the Pre series, hence Love, as you see her today - but we could fill all our worlds off-Earth with them nonetheless, all slight variations of your Rachel. That is how you think of her, isn't it? I can hear it in the tone of your voice. Even though Eldon Tyrell was assassinated, Tyrell Corp did follow-up satisfaction surveys among the Bladerunners who had elected to receive a Nexus-6. They all said the same thing. The thing they called Rachel was always their Rachel. There was something strange about that short-lived generation. They were too uncanny, too real. Who wants sometthing so real? Well... you did... and so did the other Bladerunners! But, for most people the Nexus-6 undermined their own notion of the 'specialness' of being human... How did you do it, have a baby by her?'

'You're the bio-technoligist, you ought to know.'

'And I do, she had a small cellular 'switch' that could be reversed, to enable conception. Tyrell had studied history; slaves could be expensive to buy - and his Replicants were always more expensive than the others. In the past, the cheapest slaves were the ones born from existing slaves. But you're not a bio-technoligist, so I'm curious how you did it, how you found it.'

'She knew about it, and I asked her. So she told me. You see, we trusted each other, I was a Bladerunner and could retire her at any time; she, as an Assassin-model, could kill me. We were dangerous to each other, but we also sought safety within each other. There was a symbiosis in this.'

The smallest crinkle of curiousity fleetingly signalled on the face of Love. A new piece of information had been introduced into its manufactured 'mind'.

'I'd wondered why the Nexus-6s were so anatomically correct,' continued Deckard, 'was it just to fool the scanners, or were they truly operable organs.'

'It's curious, isn't it?'

'What is?' Deckard asked.

'To know that Rachel, a mere slave-Replicant, is a legend, because she had that child. She'll be known about long after you and I are a heap of bones or ash, and forgotton. She'll become a part of human history. A work of artiface that creates another reality...'

'We had so little time together, less than five years, but she was longer lived than all other Replicants of her type, in those days. If I didn't know that Replicants couldn't do it, I'd swear she willed herself to stay alive long enough to give birth. She was a month premature when she was born...'

'... so it was a daughter. Thank you Mr Deckard, we knew of the child, but did not know that it was a girl.'

'"It?" You say? "It was a girl?" She was my daughter, and you'll never find her. I hid her after Rachel died, so that she couldn't be found; but after the Blackout, I tried and tried to find her again; it was impossible...'

'Impossible? That is what people would have said until your daughter was born. If that is possible, anything is possible. There will be a genetic marker. If we, at Wallace, test enough people - just as you old Bladerunners used to test the Replicants - we'll find that marker. We want her, and I don't accept compromise; that is why I own so many of the off-Earth worlds.'

'Still, I can't tell you where she is, even if I wanted to - and I don't - because I don't know any more. Yes, we tried to hide her, and I knew where she was, I knew the trail through the deceit. But the Blackout meant that she was lost, even to myself. We've all come to rely so much on the digital world, everything has an expression in binary, in numbers, in the digital. So much of our world is written in silicone; our data is as transient as water evaporating into steam. It is like we are writing our lives, our history in water; attempting to hold flowing water as though it were a solid. With digital there is no knowledge, no anticipation, no history, no memories, that are beyond ultimate destruction. We still need dead trees pulped to a mush and dried-out to keep these things, to write upon, as a back-up. We may as well return to cuniform, writing on baked clay tablets...'

-o-

No one gets paid for writing this kind of fiction. The only reward is in people's reactions to the story, if any. You don't have to leave a review, but you don't have to be shy about doing so either.

Does this version of the story work? Does it add anything to the original? Did you enjoy reading it?

If you did like this, you might like these Bladerunner AD 1982 stories (because the film is so different from the original book, I have written a novelisation of the film itself, in six parts). Simply type "Bladerunner" into the search box, followed by the title of each part, from the list below.

Part I, No More Blue Skied Days (Holden's interview, through to Deckard being reassigned to Bladerunning),

Part II, Memories Are Made Of This (Deckard's visit to Tyrell's, up to Rachel's visit to his apartment),

Part III, Pris, For Your Pleasure (Pris makes contact with JF Sebastien, and Deckard's pursuit and shooting of Zhora),

Part IV, How To Re-form Biology Into Mechanics (Deckard's fight with Leon, through to Roy B's arrival at JF's apartment),

Part V, The Slow Death Of A Fast Living Replicant (Roy B's killing of Tyrell, through to the 'retirement' of Pris),

Part VI, Fatal Error (the pursuit and 'retirement' of Roy B, Deckard's escape with Rachel).