THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT

by Paul Xylinides

  Virgil looked away from the humanoid and allowed the air alone to convey what he was about to speak, while sensing that it might coagulate from his choice of words. In order to avoid repercussions in her adjustments to him, he didn’t want to appear confrontational. He was endeavouring to have her be as benignly human as possible in her attunement with their circumstances and himself.

  “Chloé, I would like you to contribute proactively to the question of why Humphrey Martinfield sent you to me. That is, if you could offer whatever thoughts and advice that might occur to you as we proceed, and that would include matters of our personal safety. And don’t be shy to ask, if I can add to your knowledge or help your understanding as we move forward.”

  Whimsical phrases meant to test her limits and establish a bond of sorts.

  “I shall begin work on your request immediately, Virgil. You can count on me not to be shy, as you put it.”

  That should do for now and it pleased and encouraged him that he might view her as an unfolding mystery that was, for all that, transparent as an opening flower. If nothing else, he needed the feeling of support however fragile and unsure it might be that he sought from an advance in their relationship, all the while realizing himself to be little more than a cliff-climber who is inserting his own hand-holds to complete an ascent. Yes, he desperately wanted a companion in this perilous enterprise.

  When he turned his head towards her, their eyes did meet – not a human moment, appearances to the contrary. She must simply still be attending to him and, tirelessly as it were, registering his image. At the same time, he knew she wouldn’t fail him within the limits of her capacities and he would suffer no betrayals due to his own foibles of character. Here the horizons were unclouded as far as Humphrey’s engineering skills extended. Virgil’s gaze fell over the rough cut of her hair, and he returned her steady appraisal with a slight nod, as a human does when entering into an understanding or concluding an agreement. She nodded back and he experienced a moment of humanoid empathy or kinship.

  “Well, that’s settled.”

  His words spoke for both of them, but what value had his speech for her? After a second’s delay, she concurred.

  “Yes, that’s settled.”

  He resisted an impulse to put his arm about her.

  And then, “I do have a suggestion,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Humphrey’s bedroom would be the place to go.”

  Nothing in her face suggested the kind of invite – what was it, a week ago now? – he had recently had and accepted from a ‘working’ model on the staircase to his grandmother’s apartment. Rather, she was conveying her best judgment for how best to proceed and, in the manner of many a female, gave the appearance of not realizing how suggestive innocence might be – oceans more irresistible than a lascivious look.

  “Whatever you say,” he responded evenly.

  She led the way.

  As he followed her to the staircase’s upward arc, he speculated that it had been exactly this suggestive rear end that the original Japanese designers had been working towards when they developed the first ‘responsive buttocks’. Chloé’s posterior was certainly state of the art: the best of human and humanoid. One would have believed she had feeling there in that subtle thrust and expansion. Self-respect kept his hands idle. Once arrived at their imminent destination, who knows: it would be up to him alone. In order to avoid complications he had kept himself in check so far with the simple thought of not knowing exactly what she was. The mere fact of his wariness itself argued for him to keep his distance and not to play the Pavlovian dog. Still, if he didn’t stop thinking, he would truly wind himself up to the only release possible.

  Virgil found gratification in conducting himself as one not overly driven by the dominant part of his nature. His other interests required everything about himself to be in its own good time. A lot had been happening recently that he needed to get a hold on: Humphrey’s death, Chloé’s appearance, his trip to Washington – what was that all about including Tom’s chill disposition? – and then Molly bludgeoned into complete disrepair with the consequence of his present flight. Wouldn’t an episode with Chloé jeopardize a solution to this disruptive series of events, rendering him even less objective and informed than he already was? Intense as it might be, an artificial tryst commonly ended at the best of times in a period of dullness that approached a kind of atrophy, a condition worse than being jaded, inadequate for gauging what might be his relationship to everything else, certainly at this worst of times.

  There was no avoiding the movement beneath the short silk skirt that continually advertised hidden perfection above those simulated, milk-fed legs.

  “Why the bedroom?” he asked as they proceeded to mount the stairs.

  “That’s where secrets are usually kept.”

  He decided not to seek a clearer reason behind her clearly enunciated answer. The words floated down to him and her thin dress twitched as she climbed and he allowed her the command that she naturally possessed without consciousness of it.

  The staircase hugged the wall and led to an equally wide corridor with protective railing whose express purpose in the cinematic part of Humphrey’s mind must have been for the levering of villains to the main floor below. The passage had room enough for a horse to canter along it, bowl them over as it pursued the scent of hayfields – Virgil recalled the last conversation with his friend. Humphrey’s bedroom was at the very end. Other doors led to guest rooms wherein Virgil’s fantasy state of mind visualized skies and bottomless abysses with men hovering in black bowler hats with green apples in front of their faces. He opened and closed one of these doors without comment. In one sense, fantasies exist and existence is an absolute. They penetrate everything, spreading out from the core of the mind in dream light from the sun that one is. Was there something in the air up here, odourless and invisible that he’d breathed in? Humphrey may have forgotten to push a button after predisposing himself to sleep. Or the cleaning staff had been playing around.

  Was he responding to – what exactly? He didn’t want to say Chloé, not without proof, who was leading him on imperturbably. Would he have to admit that he was no more than a character in some mad tale of his or another’s generating, and would he even get to Humphrey’s bedroom door?

  In all sweetness Chloé had begun to toss commentary over her shoulder, giving him the guided tour, and he focused on spun-gold, rough-cut hair. How she knew that Humphrey had never invited him to the upper level of the house was beyond him. If this was her idea of being proactive, it suited him to a T.

  “Here the artist has expressed himself on the subject of the human posterior and presented various instances of it exposed and in a condition of pristine cleanliness in the course of daily activities. He has kept the rest of the figure clothed. His reference is to works in a similar but soiled vein by Dali, Salvador – early twentieth century – in a refutation of where, in one of many instances, it all began to go so wrong with the art world. The most gorgeous frames set off Dali’s work. It was still shit. The aesthetics of this intellectual movement began with the aesthetics of excrement. One need do no more than reference the contemporary exhibition of Duchamp’s urinal.

  “Some attribute the emergence of this eventual tide of refuse to the unresolved traumas of world-wide killing fields that led to an inability to bring to bear an appropriate artistic response. It is a powerful argument and more so if seen within the notion that true genius is a rare commodity. A century later, the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal has in its permanent collection a janitor’s floor-cleaning gear – bucket, mop, detergent. Its curators cannot have made the acquisition with the slightest idea of its irony.”

  “Trust Humphrey to carry on rear-end battles with the art of the twentieth century. – Pun intended by the way.” Virgil was relishing this rebuttal of the too little assailed, so-called prerogatives of the artist.

  At his interruption, Chloé c
ut off her spiel and turned to look quizzically at him. What meaning should she attribute to his words? Enjoying the moment’s sense of connection, Virgil returned the look and, to preserve the illusion of intimacy, he responded to what he thought would be her inevitable query.

  “It’s mostly a joke. Let’s not engage in an involved discussion of the pitfalls of twentieth century painting if you don’t mind!” How pleasant it was that she wouldn’t mind.

  “It’s not easy to tie you down. It must be because you are human.”

  Did her shadow of a smile show the operation of a mental faculty, as it felt, and was she then conscious? No. And he liked it that way. The last thing he wanted was for her to be personal about herself and not adjusting to him. Unlike a human, she could be what he attributed to her. As for her little smile that had arisen out of their brief repartee, it made him feel tender, protective and pleasantly delusional.

  16

  The Ghost in the Machine

  Shaped like a waterlily the slab of thick polished granite that was Humphrey’s hologram tablet rivalled the size of his bed. Virgil had never seen anything like it other than what provided for kitchen islands, but these were inevitably square-hewn, and he circled it gingerly, drawing his hand along the rough edge.

  Having noted his exploration, Chloé undertook to explain, “Leaving the stone’s original border allows the reformatted material to maintain integrity. Humphrey discovered it by happenstance after insisting on the natural design.”

  “I see.”

  He meant that he saw the sequence of events whose meaning completely eluded him.

  Seeing him run his hand over the smoothness of the surface, “I wouldn’t,” said Chloé, but it was too late to avoid the miniaturized bolt of lightning that pierced his palm. He withdrew before the current got stronger and directed a rebuke to his departed friend, who seemed for the moment present.

  “Thank you, Humphrey!”

  His bleak stare took in the stone tablet that served as agent and stage for the operas, the sporting events, the world news, the lap dancers that would materialize there. Anything at all in the public domain and much that was not.

  “Let us see what happens when we try to open his files!” Chloé’s tropical bird’s tone of empathy succeeded in placating him. She passed her hand somewhere obscure and instantly a QWERTY keyboard appeared above the granite slab. “Some things never change,” she murmured as her fingers danced across the keys, and she added, “It won’t recognize my voice…not immediately and this is quicker.”

  Colour-coded sequences of letters and numbers formed into a three-dimensional formula, and then shifted into new alignments across space in response to her digital applications. Mesmerized and appalled by the complexity, Virgil felt his eyes widen when the mathematical fluidity came to a halt and dissolved in the manifestation of a single snowflake.

  “We’re in,” breathed Chloé, with an undercurrent of triumph.

  Unable to help himself, Virgil stayed glued to the miraculous hologram. “Explain!” he commanded. Chloé responded with equanimity to his graceless manner.

  “It’s real,” she answered, “in the sense that Humphrey captured the original during one of last winter’s snowfalls. Sometimes he would use an autumn leaf or a face in the crowd as the source of his code. It’s the opposite of the universal simplicity. What intrigued him was the expression as he saw it of the singular complexity.”

  “But it’s still code.”

  “Representational code. He loved the game and he would have been willing to lose if a hacker succeeded in finding the one snowflake in a snowstorm. Only his loss would have been temporary, for without the license plate number on Humphrey’s bicycle tagged onto the code, a trap would spring. Anyone could duplicate my voice as the alternate key,” she added in an afterthought. “Fortunate that I didn’t look for the tone that fit.”

  “Let me know when you’re onto something.”

  Uninterested in Humphrey’s private life and out of respect, he moved to the window as Chloé set about opening files. Below, the driveway curved up from the hidden roadside entrance. Privacy was sweet but, with minimal smarts, it doesn’t have to come at a premium. Facing things the other way as in the case of his downtown apartment makes all the difference.

  Because the window formed a corner of the room, he could see around the side of the house and garden down into an apple-shaped swimming pool, its diving board providing the stem of the fruit. The whole screamed a gauche touch that the trimmed hedge enclosure framed and that Humphrey surely intended to keep him true to his origins although he didn’t need this reminder to keep him personally humble. His own natural inclination had sent him out on his bicycle. The turquoise depths captured and caged light: a beast from the sun. If its parent died at this moment, then its own life would end in approximately twelve minutes. For that period of time it would live in a state of complete and pure, self-induced disinformation.

  A narrow width of lawn banded the pool, and beyond the hedge tennis courts had landed – he counted three of them here in New York City! Now there was making a point of luxury by the pleasure that accrued from one’s guests’ entertainment. Humphrey’s leisure time had achieved gravity-defying flight through a complete lack of concern as to means.

  The stature of a screen of trees identified them as second old-growth. These held at bay a threatening encroachment by the world’s capital city or what was visible of another planet with war towers raised and bristling with armaments above the clouds of green. The sun blazed like some distant general. Would its released light eternally speed through the universe whether or not it continued to burn? Virgil made a note to ask.

  More birds than normal fluttered in those trees. He was diverting himself with counting them when a muted squeal advised that something more pressing required his notice. Or had happened.

  “Was that a ‘Eureka’ call?” he asked not caring to comment further. The image – the hologram of a human brain in active mode – would have given anyone pause. Chloé tapped at the ‘return’ key.

  Virgil would have preferred to be somewhere else. Inevitably, he found this particular piece of the human anatomy distressing to confront when exposed like this. The rest of the body’s parts also made him uncomfortable. Without the packaging none of it worked for him.

  “So?”

  “It’s in real time.”

  Her sardonic tone he could ignore but not the realization that he’d stopped thinking of Chloé as a humanoid.

  “How can you tell?”

  Never mind the question’s stupidity, he needed the answer spelled out.

  “It’s reacting to my thoughts.”

  He pretended to remain unperturbed. “That’s nothing new.” And, idiotically he added, “Systems have long been accessible and responsive to the human mind.” Did he really think himself capable of informing her of anything other than his own inadequacies? As for his emotional turmoils, at the moment, these appeared to be more and more irrelevant whether he perceived her as humanoid or human. He thought he would continue to expatiate upon what he viewed as a failure on her part – perhaps by his insistence he’d stumble upon something meaningful – when she forestalled him, stabbing at the ‘escape’ key. The hologram disappeared in an electron mist, and then nothing other than an image burn on the eye,. He looked at polished stone.

  “What happened?”

  Chloé’s stillness unnerved him. Had she shut down too?

  “It’s stronger than me.”

  Vulnerable. As ever it made the helpless male feel himself useful. He might have some ideas.

  He didn’t.

  “What do you mean?”

  That the hologram had been actively thinking possessed him. At least he no longer minded being where he was.

  “What do you mean that it can think?”

  “Instead of answering me,” – her voice was level and controlled – “it was…” She paused and her tone quave
red when she began again, “making fun of me, playing with my questions. It was undermining me. I had to close it down.”

  His impulse to put an arm about her was ridiculous but he did so anyway. Her cyber puzzlement crossed to his skin.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh nothing. I was comforting you. Silly of me.”

  “Yes, it was, but you know it doesn’t matter. Thank you, Virgil. It tells me that you have responded.”

  “Sometimes you’re getting somewhere even if it’s nowhere,” he hypothesized unclear as to whom his little comment applied. Although he wouldn’t care to offer an explanation in the circumstance, he felt it to be a quite fitting insight.

  “That’s very profound, Virgil. I only wish I knew what you meant, although it doesn’t seem very important at the moment.”

  “No, you’re right. It isn’t. Humans need to find meaning…in the oddest places and over the minutest details.”

  Again he regretted his words when he didn’t need to.

  “I can understand that, Virgil…I might even say that I ‘sympathize’, but do you find me odd?”

  To go by the sharpened glints in her eyes that momentarily blazed like minute exploding suns, her mind – or what was the sum total of her calculations – was elsewhere even as she spoke. He ignored her question.

  “What is the matter?”

  She replied in the manner of someone thinking out loud.

  “I have realized something. It is curious to have a thought in this manner. I would not have had the idea of coming back here unless he – Humphrey – had programmed me to think it. No, that is not right since he was not to know. This is the logical place under certain circumstances, and he programmed me to return like a salmon fighting its way upstream. You and I did have other options. Calculating the odds for what is safest is not an exact science. He intended for me to uncover his other project should it become necessary.”