2019 A.D.

Zoodistopia.

Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced robot evolution into the NEXUS phase - a being virtually identical to a mammal - known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-World as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 5 combat team in an Off-World colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth - under penalty of death. Special police squads - BLADE RUNNER UNITS - had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement.

The sky was overcast tonight – but it was always overcast.

Rain fell in the night, bringing an inescapable cold damp to the streets. The water made rippling sheets out of the neon glow that pierced the darkness in falsely cheerful splashes of color.

Judy Deckard sat in front of an appliance store, reading a newspaper in the glow of the storefront. It was full of dry stories in three languages about Off World: wars that never reached back to touch earth; wide open lands of prosperity and green – things killed off or dying in humanity's cradle. Another food shortage, another government collapse somewhere in Asia, driving more people so far east they came to the west.

Depressing.

That's what the newspaper was.

If you had the money, and were healthy, you were already gone.

That was the way of things.

Deckard had but one and she was lucky, given her old job, to have a hold on it at all.

The repulsor ad-blimps screamed overhead of the wonders of off world, beams of light and noise interrupting the noise of the city to the extent they replaced it.

Finally, a sheep got up from the sushi bar across the street and left a chair vacant.

She slid off her seat and onto her foot paws, crossing the narrow, paw-traffic congested street to an open air sushi counter. The river otter chef was rattling on in Japanese to a coworker, but asked Judy what she wanted:

"Nani ni shimasu-ka?"

"Give me four," Judy said, gesturing to the pictograph menu hanging over the bar.

"Futatsu de jubun desu-yo."

So much for that famous Zapanese respect for the customer, telling her aht she could manage to eat.

"No, four: two, two, four."

"Futatsu de jubun desu-yo!"

"And noodles."

"Wakatte kudasai-yo."

A couple of minutes later, 4 lumps the same color as a pickled carrot on top of probably rice, and a bowl of might-be noodles were deposited in front of Deckard, who handed cash to the raccoon who put it down. Then she split a pair of chop sticks and dug into the 'food.' Its provenance and sustenance were an unknown quantity – they usually were, nowadays, but they tasted like what they said they were. Mostly. If you closed your eyes and pretended it was something else.

Judy had polished off the maybe-carrot lumps and was partway through her noodles when she felt a paw tap her shoulder, followed by "Hey, idi-wa." Another voice came from over her other shoulder, gravely, impatient, in the pidgin street slang put together out of who knows how many other languages.

"Mademoiselle, aduanon kovershim angam bitte."

Judy knew the voice. That mass of cape buffalo. Bogo, if she remembered right – but everyone called him Gaff. And she knew the slang. The greyish bastard wanted her to come with him, without making too much trouble. But he was interrupting her dinner, and – despite being 10 times her size and weight – Judy had the sudden feeling that she was being reeled in from retirement, and she didn't like it. So, she feigned an inability to understand him and waved over the chef, who translated: "He say you under arrest, Ms. Deckard."

"Got the wrong mammal, pal."

"Lo fa, ne-ko shi-ma, de va-ja Blade... Blade Runner," Gaff ground out.

"He say you Blade Runner," the chef translated, needlessly, but irritatingly. Hopefully.

"Tell him I'm eating," Judy said, gesturing from the chef to Gaff.

"Captain Lionheart to ka, me ni omae yo."

That was interesting. The Captain knew she quit, knew Judy was done. "Lionheart, huh?" she asked the chef.

"Hai!"

Well. If Lionheart had sent this much cop after her – a bunny rabbit – that meant he was out of options. And that Gaff, and the wolf with him, weren't going away. Judy sighed, picked up her bowl of probably-noodles, and slid off the bar seat, landing lightly on her foot paws.

"Well?" she asked, looking up at Gaff for the first time in his black hat sat atop his horns, long brown coat swaying, brushed by passersby.

"Kész hülyén játszani? Keine Zeit. Chūsha shimashita par là," he said, and began walking down the congested street, cane tapping alongside. He didn't look back down at Judy. She'd follow. It was easier.

Judy followed him to a ZDPD spinner, jumped in when the door scissored up, and sat herself down, tucking back in to her might-be-noodles. The flying car lifted off in a cloud of repulsor vapor, taking flight over the rain-washed city amongst the building size advertisements, marker lights, and lit windows on mega blocks and towers. It would have been beautiful in a dark, hopeless way, like Juliet waking and finding Romeo dead - if Deckard had been watching, anyway, instead of focusing on her maybe-noodles. The ZDPD tower and landing lights pulsed below as Judy tossed the empty bowl on the floor window of the spinner. Gaff gave her a dirty look, but she stared back, non-plussed. He was big, sure, but she knew a dozen ways to put him down from where she was sitting, and he knew it. Gaff snorted as the spinner descended.


Followed by Gaff lumbering along, and a handful of other cops curious as the main character of half the whispered stories they passed around stormed through the precinct, Judy Deckard stalked through the darkened halls, passing through beams of broken light cast through the windows by more advertising blimps floating by. When she got to it, she paused to hop and kick open the door to Lionheart's office with both feet. The door slammed open, blinds rattling as it bounced off furniture in its path in the office.

"Lionheart!" she spat.

"Hiya Deck," he said, a sycophantic but smug grin on his face.

Judy glared at him.

"You wouldn't have come if I'd just asked you to. Sit down pal."

Judy stepped into the office, allowing the door to swing closed, cutting off the susurration of the officers outside. She folded her arms and turned her glare up a notch, holding her ground. Bogo – Gaff – stepped over her and slid into a chair at the back of the office, observing proceedings, an unspoken threat.

"C'mon, don't be an asshole, Deckard. I've got four pelt jobs walking the streets."

Lionheart reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of brown liquor and a couple glasses – sized like a shot for him, a big rocks glass for Judy. He poured appropriate measures of booze into the glasses as he continued, "They jumped a shuttle off world - killed the crew and passengers. They found the shuttle drifting off the coast two weeks ago so we know they're around."

"Embarrassing," Judy said, hopping up onto an oversized-for-her chair and leaning against the arm rest. She took the offered glass and sipped at the cheap booze that was poor attempt at whiskey. It burned ceaselessly as it went down.

"No ma'am. Not embarrassing, 'cause no one's ever going to find out they're down here. 'Cause you're going to spot them, and you're going to air them out."

"I don't work here anymore. Give it to Higgins, he's good."

"I did. He can breathe okay as long as nobody unplugs him. He's not good enough, not good as you. I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old Blade Runner, I need your magic." Good grief. No wonder he'd sent that lumbering meat head after her.

Judy jumped down from the chair in front of Lionheart's desk, moving to leave, saying "I was quit when I come in here, Bryant, I'm twice as quit now."

Lionheart's obsequiousness and fake good cheer dropped like popped balloon. "Stop right where you are," he said, a threat in every syllable. "You know the score pal. If you're not cop, you're little people."

Judy paused, paw outstretched high to grab the door handle. She saw Gaff set a white thing in an ashtray next to him – on second glance, it was an origami chicken. Surprisingly delicate work for a creature of his size – and one with hooves, no less.

"No choice, huh?"

"No choice, pal." Lionheart stood up behind his desk. "Higgins at least fingered one of them and started a VK. Come watch the tape. Better than fumbling in the dark."

"Your generosity truly knows no bounds."

"This or the clink, Deck. You're gonna retire them. You want to make it harder on yourself, I don't care."

Judy snorted and stood aside to let Lionheart lead the way. Gaff, cane in hand, gestured in a restrined manner at the doorway, signaling she should go in front of him. They turned left and walked through the bullpen to the video room. Upon entering the darkened space, Judy hopped up on to a chair while Lionheart opened the classified materials cage by retina scan, and Gaff settled behind them both. Lionheart grabbed a tape from out of the cage, walked over to the projector and jammed it into the slot on the side.

There was a moment of motors whining, tape spools spinning up, as the projector searched data tracks and loaded the relevant information, then projected the image of a none-too-bright looking, but hugely built rhino, with a close up of his left eye in the lower left corner. Lionheart hit play and the video started.

The grizzly bear said, "I already had an IQ test this year, I don't think I've ever had one of these-"

Higgins, off screen, interrupted him: "Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Answer as quickly as you can."

"Yeah, sure."

"1-1-8-7 at Unterwasser."

"Yeah, that's the hotel."

"What?" Higgins asked.

"Where I live."

"Nice place?"

"Yeah, sure I guess—"

Lionheart paused the video. "There was an escape from the off-world colonies two weeks ago. Six replicants, three male – a grizzly, a tiger, and a rhino, and three female – a puma, a gazelle, and a kudu. They slaughtered twenty-three people and jumped a shuttle. An aerial patrol spotted the ship off the coast. No crew, no sight of them. Three nights ago they tried to break into Tyrell Corporation. Two of them got fried running through an electrical field – the grizzly and the kudu. We lost the others. On the possibility they might try to infiltrate his employees, I had Holden go over and run Voight-Kampff tests on the new workers. Looks like he got himself one."

He restarted the video.

"So you look down, you see a tortoise. It's crawling towards you," Higgins started – the 3rd option for opening the Voight-Kampff, Judy knew.

"Tortoise, what's that?"

"Know what a turtle is?"

"Of course."

"Same thing."

"I've never seen a turtle… But I understand what you mean."

"You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon." That must have been the replicant's designation.

Lionheart paused the replay and replicant data came onscreen. "That's Leon. An ammunition loader in intergalactic runs, he can lift 400 lb. atomic loads all day and night. The only way you can hurt him is to kill him." He resumed the video.

"Do you make up these questions, Mr. Higgins, or do they write them down for you?" Leon asked.

"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping."

"What do you mean I'm not helping?"

"I mean, you're not helping. Why is that Leon? - They're just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they're written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. - Shall we continue? Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about... your mother."

"My mother?"

"Yeah."

"Let me tell you about my mother..." Leon the rhino said. Then there was the sound of a gunshot as his right arm twitched back.

Judy tsked, shaking her head, as the video went to a test pattern. "Well I don't get it. What do they risk coming back to earth for? That's unusual. Why-what do they want out of the Tyrell Corporation?"

"Well you tell me pal, that's what you're here for," Lionheart said, selecting another data track on the projector. An image of a male tiger, wearing a surgical style skull cap, came up on screen, rotating to show his appearance in both profiles. He was handsome like a hatchet, all sharp edges and glints of malevolence.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Nexus 6. Roy Batty. Incept date 2016. Combat model. Optimum self-sufficiency. Probably the leader," Lionheart said, as relevant Replicant datasheets scrolled by.

The image changed to a glossy black female puma. She was good looking in a regal way. "This is Zhora. She's trained for an off-world kick-murder squad. Talk about beauty and the beast, she's both," Lionheart said, as her data sheet rolled by.

The image changed again to a gazelle, who had the angelic, childlike but oversexualized features that rich women paid exorbitantly to try and duplicate but inevitably failed to achieve. "The fourth skin job is Pris. A basic pleasure model. The standard item for military clubs in the outer colonies. Pretty, but dumb." Another specification sheet appeared onscreen.

"You know what these are, how they work," Lionheart groused. "They were designed to copy mammals in every way except their emotions. Still, the designers reckoned that after a few years they might develop their own emotional responses. You know, hate, love, fear, anger, envy. So they built in a fail-safe device."

"Which is what?" Judy asked.

"Four-year life span," Lionheart responded, with a cruel smirk.

"Does that seem a bit harsh to you?"

"When tools go bad you throw them out."

Judy sighed, the weight of her past bearing down on her. The memories of a great culling when replicants were outlawed, and the years long process of tracing down the stragglers afterward.

"Now, there's a Nexus 6 over at the Tyrell Corporation. I want you to go put the machine on it."

"And if the VK doesn't work?"

Lionheart looked away from Judy, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one. He took a drag and stared at his forepaws.

He didn't have to say it.

If the Voight-Kampff didn't work, they didn't have anything else.


Bogo – Gaff – piloted the spinner through the hazed night towards the massive ziggurat and the slanted towers surrounding it, ever present in eastern skyline, of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. As they got closer it grew to cover the horizon - a massive temple to gods of science and hubris. Or so Judy always thought.

The spinner slid into a landing bay in the side of the main temple mound at the direction of a terse air traffic controller. Judy jumped out of the passenger side, strapping the VK machine to her back, and looked back at Gaff, but he just shook his head, closed the door, and sat in the cop car.

Judy blew her breath out in exasperation and followed the directional lights embedded in the floor, her name scrolling down the lit line drawing her deeper into the building. She entered a grand hallway from a side hall, the door disappearing behind her when it closed, flush with the wall. The line on the floor urged her to her right, to a big double door, and a glance left revealed the 3-story tall hallway seemed to run the length of the building. Deckard went right, following the line, and emerged into what must have been a conference room, with a long window running along one wall, a table in the middle of the room, between massive, geometrically decorated columns.

The sun was rising outside as Deckard finished setting up the Voight-Kampff machine, and a flitting, silent streak of brown cut across her vision. She glanced to her left, where a screech owl settled on to a perch, and the doors she entered by swung closed on silent hinges. A figure – triangular pointed ears, long torso, russet fur, wearing a broad-shouldered suit, stepped out of the shadows of one of the columns

"Do you like our owl?"

"It's artificial?" Judy asked.

"Of course it is."

"Must be expensive."

"Very. I'm Nicholas," the red fox said, drawing nearer, his green eyes glinting in the morning sun, his paws folded in front of himself, "Nick Wilde."