Disclaimer: I do not claim to own any of the topics of which I write.
To sharpen a blade, you must be prepared to make sacrifices. What's that saying? You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs? The truth is grimmer than that. The hone a dull blade, you must first choose a recipient, something to take the beatings that the knife requires to stay sharp.
I don't know why I became a policeman. Boredom, maybe? But once I got my feet wet in the cop business, it was clear what I was destined to do. Blade Runners, I looked up at the men that passed my table, and I could always tell. They were the ones with the empty eyes. We looked up to them, all us wet-behind-the-ears cadets. I stood out among my training unit as the sharpest, the wittiest. And only the sharpest become the Blades.
Those first few months of hell in the training academy were nothing compared to my first retirement. I lost many disillusions that day.
It was in Los Angeles on a particularly sunny day. The breeze lighted upon my face like a lover's gentle caress, brushing against it softly. The senior Blade Runner I was sent out with said few words to me, though I babbled excitedly to him. All of the sims, all the training, it all led up to this one glorious moment in the sun.
My partner, as I was so juvenile to think of him as, spotted the replicant easily in the crowd. I followed his eyes to the young, beautiful woman standing on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for a bus. In a rush of adolescent adrenaline, I charged the girl, drawing my gun and shouting. She darted away before I was even close. The older man cursed at me but I ignored him and took up pursuit.
She slipped out of sight in the crowd, but I watched the people in front of me. If someone's running, someone else is bound to look. A few heads turned in the same direction behind them, and I leapt over a garbage can into the street and saw the girl run across. I waved my gun, issuing another wordless warning to her, but it never reached her fake ears. She fell to her knees as I got to her and she died at my feet, a bullet in her heart from my partner's gun.
Arrogance was the first to go, followed by cowardice and my sunny outlook on life. Cynicism replaced it. During the next few years, as my skills were whetted against the stone of Blade Running, my innocence disappeared in a cloud of gun smoke. As I peered into a mirror after a particularly trying day, I stared deep into my eyes, and they were as flat as the smoky sky that colored my window, as empty as the others that had gone before me.
I woke up that next morning, my wife yelled at me, begging for sympathy, empathy, anything, and as she stormed tearfully out of the door with bags in her hand, I realized fully the sacrifice of my job.
Killing people for a living requires a special kind of psyche, one like a knife. One that lets itself cut down on other things in order to stay in prime condition. What I had lost, on all those expeditions in the dark Los Angeles streets, were my sentiments, my passions. The blade had whittled them away to nothing in its attempt at sharpness.
My basic humanity, my essential core, had been destroyed. Emotions, feelings, all those warm, so obviously human things, they were gone. And for what reason? What had I accomplished? Ridding the world of machines that, if only this, could make us realize what it means to wholly live? In my killing frenzy, I had become of them, a machine that did whatever it was bid to do. I no longer lived, not mentally, not spiritually, only physically.
That was when I quit, because I knew then I was no different than the things that I killed.
