by K. W. Jeter
'All right,' said Iris. 'You're right; I don't really have anything else going right now.' She stepped forward, closing her eyes for a moment as though not wanting to see the cliff-edge in front of her. 'Lead on.'
The last of the streetlights' blue illumination fell away behind them, as Vogel brought her to a point some fifty meters or so around the edge of the ruins. Here, a pair of immense stone and metal slabs had jammed against each other, forming a triangular cavern with the ground. With his unencumbered hand, Vogel lifted a net-like skein of wires up from the unlit space's mouth, then ducked his head and entered. 'Come on.' He held the wires up for Iris. 'I can't show you what you need to see if you just hang out there.'
With her mind made up, fatal or otherwise, Iris didn't need any more prompting. She had already followed him into one destroyed and decayed locale, though the downed UN advertising blimp had been but the tiniest fraction of these ruins' immensity; perhaps this place would contain the answers to the questions raised by the other.
'I don't care for your taste in habitats.' With her head and shoulders bowed below the cavern's angled ceiling, Iris followed the darting beam of the small flashlight Vogel had taken from his coveralls' pocket. The ground beneath her feet was an inch deep in puddled water, seeping down from above. 'Why not get yourself a regular apartment?'
'What fun would that be?' Vogel glanced back at her, his smile malicious. 'Besides, the blimp was affectation; this is serious. This is where you have to be.'
Bet me, thought Iris grimly. The crude tunnel's ceiling had lowered even further, forcing both her and Vogel into a bent-kneed crouch as they proceeded into the dark confines. The air smelled musty and soggy-damp, and she had been wrong, technically, about the complex of ruins being unoccupied: the city's ubiquitous vermin, with eyes that glittered as yellow pinpoints in the beam of Vogel's flashlight, scurried ahead, their tiny, sharp claws pattering against the smaller chunks of rubble.
More disturbing noises, lower in pitch, came from the ruins themselves: soft groaning and grinding, as though the jagged slabs of concrete and twisted steel were about to go through some delayed seismic rearrangement, and come down collapsing upon her and Vogel's heads.
'Hey —' Iris's voice broke into echoes and died away. 'Is this place safe?'
'It's all relative.' Vogel glanced back at her. 'Considering how close you've come to getting killed out there.'
Their crouching progress caused Iris to lose track of distance traveled; she couldn't be sure whether they had gone a hundred meters into the tumbled ruins, switching from one narrow passage to another, or an accumulation of miles. The small reserves of strength she had managed to force together when she had slipped out of the hospital were now close to a final ebb; her heart was laboring in her chest as she steadied herself, with one hand clutching for holds on the rough surface of the tunnel wall.
Blind from exhaustion, Iris bumped into Vogel; he had stopped in the narrow passageway without her noticing.
'Careful . . .' With one hand locked onto her arm, he kept her from falling. 'We're right at the edge.'
Iris found that she could stand upright. At some point they had emerged from the tunnel into a larger space, though still roofed with the giant slabs of concrete and steel; she could sense their tonnage above, blotting out the night sky. She shook off Vogel's hand. 'Edge of what?'
'You'll dig this.' Vogel tucked the butt-end of the flashlight into his sling, so he could adjust the beam from narrow to wide. 'It's worth seeing.'
She watched as he played the light out to one side. The surfaces it struck were so far away that it seemed for a moment that she and Vogel were in some kind of subterranean cathedral, its vaultings and pillars constructed in pure brutalist fashion. The only thing missing was any semblance of floor or bare-earth ground a few feet from where they stood. A yawning chasm had opened up, almost bottomless in appearance as the flared beam of light angled down into it.
'What the hell is this?' Iris could see other shapes, complicated metal and transparent forms, all still interlinked, even though the destruction of the building complex above had obviously wrought major damage upon them. 'Some kind of factory?'
'You got it, sweetheart.' Vogel used the flashlight beam to pick out a few of the larger pieces of broken manufacturing equipment. 'This is the real heart of the late Tyrell Corporation – or some kind of major organ, at least. This is where the action went on, production-wise. All the assembly lines for the Tyrell Corporation's various replicant models were right here. We're talking about major bioengineering processes, building ready-to-ship units from cell cultures, all the way out to skin and hair; even the toenails. Everything except for a few bits and pieces that the Tyrell Corporation contracted out to specialist prototype developers, such as the eyes. Take a look.'
Iris stepped closer to the chasm's edge and looked down to where the flashlight beam slid across the jumbled-together factory equipment. A few of the transparent pieces of machinery revealed their contents: human-like forms, some merely skeletal, others with recognizable internal organs attached to the white frameworks. Adult figures, no children or infants; all were dead, but a few had obviously come closer to birth and life than others. To Iris, the contents of the chasm resembled a mass grave, torn open and exposed by whatever explosives had leveled the buildings above.
'Of course,' continued Vogel, 'this is just where they assembled the flesh and bones, the physical part of the product. There's a lot more to manufacturing replicants than that. Matter of fact, before Tyrell achieved a monopoly in the industry, there were other companies producing replicants. Not here in LA; most of the others were over in Europe. What enabled the Tyrell Corporation to snap up the franchise for the UN's off-world emigration program – which was the big money – were the little extras, the non-physical stuff it put into its products. The programing; the stuff in the replicants' heads.'
Something about the dark vista in front of Iris, illuminated one piece at a time by the shifting flashlight beam, angered her. She could feel a surge of blood at the center of her skull, as the small bright oval assembled a deeply concave terrain of broken production equipment and pale human forms, dried and flensed by the heat of the explosions into twisted leather and protruding splinters of ivory, all of which would perish no further. An image came into her thoughts, of the Tyrell Corporation's production line as it had been once, brightly lit, sterile and efficient as a hospital operating room on a grander scale. Iris could see it all, as clearly as though the other image, the one produced by Vogel's flashlight poking about in the darkness, were something evoked on a phosphor-dot screen, pixels without substance or meaning. This is the illusion, thought Iris, closing her eyes to the world in front of her, watching instead the one that had sprung up behind the wall of her brow. That one seemed both more real and more alive, with the human-like forms stirring their limbs, awake and fully formed, right down to the memories inside them; an industrial birth, but nevertheless a true one. The gift of Dr Eldon Tyrell, no matter how limited or dark its intent. A four-year lifespan was still life.
Vogel's words broke into her thoughts. 'Most of that cerebral-content design stuff took place upstairs.' He sounded like a dispassionate tour-guide. 'The actual force-loading process was one of the last steps before the de-vatting—'
'Okay, okay.' Iris stepped back from the chasm's edge. 'I've seen enough. If this is what you wanted to show me, great, you've done it. But I'm ready to leave now.'
'No, you're not.' The beam of Vogel's flashlight swung back into the tunnel where they stood. 'The show's only started.' He started down another branch. 'Come on.'
The new path led upward, sometimes steeply enough that Iris had to scramble up tilted slabs and rubble piles to keep Vogel in sight. Despite the exertions necessary, her breath came easier to her, the air in the higher spaces less confined and rank; through a few overhead chinks, Iris managed to catch fragmented glimpses of the night sky.
'Here we go.' Vogel stopped at a level sectio
n. 'This is what you came here for.'
The flashlight revealed a surreal juxtaposition, an ordinary door set at a skewed angle into a scarred and crumbling wall of concrete and exposed girder-ends. For a moment, Iris felt like the heroine of some dimly remembered children's story who had followed a waistcoated rabbit down a hole in the earth, only to find just such deranged and prosaic furnishings.
'What's on the other side?' Iris could see that the door was made of richly polished wood, its dimensions both higher and wider than doors she had encountered in that other world, outside the ruins.
'See for yourself.' Vogel grasped the ornate brass knob, twisted it and pushed, then stepped back so Iris could go ahead of him. 'Make yourself at home.'
She walked into the further darkness, feeling the smooth difference of its floor, covered only with dust, compared to the rubble-strewn tunnels through which she and Vogel had traveled. Like the door, the room itself was tilted at an angle, as though it were an antique sailing ship run aground on a costal reef; without a wall immediately handy, to touch and steady herself against, Iris had to lean back a bit to keep her balance. As she watched, the room slowly took perceptible form, in wavering, massed candlelight. With the flashlight switched off, Vogel lit the ranks of tapers in several elaborate, floor-standing and wall-mounted candelabra.
'Behold,' said Vogel, his self-appointed task completed. He snuffed out the loose candle he had been using as a lighter, his one good hand pressing the wick against the front of his coveralls. 'Look familiar?'
I've been here before, realized Iris. Not in the flesh, the way she was now, breathing the room's captured air and seeing the actual, expensively wood-paneled walls behind floor-to-ceiling swaths of heavy, ivory-colored fabrics. But as good as; the surresper device in her apartment had summoned up an illusion of this room, complete with the shifting, moody light of the candles, from the datad that Meyer had first given her. Having walked through that illusion, superimposed over her apartment's living room, she already knew her way around in the reality of it. She glanced over to the wall at one side, farthest from the ranks of burning candles, and saw, as she expected, the empty perch on which the owl had wrapped its talons, golden eyes blinking and watching everything that went on.
'So I take it,' said Iris aloud, 'that these are the private quarters of the late Dr Eldon Tyrell?' Even in the room's precariously angled condition, with dust from the surrounding rubble having been sifted across every surface, the expensive luxury was apparent. 'Guess he really did have the bucks.'
'Enough.' Vogel gave an appreciative nod, surveying the expansive suite of rooms with an explorer's proprietary manner, as if by discovering them he had taken possession from their original owner. 'Let's just say that Dr Tyrell had a taste for the finer things in life, and he didn't mind spending what it took to get them. Case in point being a real live owl, of course. Besides —' A wave of Vogel's good hand took in the room and the ones beyond it. 'All tax write-offs; he'd get the Tyrell Corporation to pay for what he wanted. Not only luxuries, of course.' With one finger, Vogel pointed toward the intricately worked ceiling. 'The corporation also paid to have the good doctor's private quarters structurally reinforced, to withstand any kind of seismic or otherwise destructive event. Even explosions that took place within the building complex itself wouldn't have been able to touch this area. You get past that pricey wood on the walls, there's enough of a steel cage wrapped around these rooms, all strung on breakaway connector joints, to have withstood anything short of old-time thermonuclear warheads. Even the windows.' Another gesture, to the wall opposite. 'They had steel barriers, nearly a half-meter thick, that came slamming down like guillotine blades when the complex was destroyed. There was a self-contained oxygen supply that kicked in, running off power sources separate from the buildings' main grid. That subsystem has gone dead by now, though; the hermetic seals have retracted. But basically, if Eldon Tyrell had still been alive when his corporation went up, he could've ridden out the explosions with nothing more than a few bruises.'
'What happened to him?' Iris peered around at the candle-illuminated spaces. 'Why was he already dead when this happened? I mean . . . unless he died of old age or a heart attack or something.'
'Hardly.' Vogel shook his head. 'Somebody like Tyrell doesn't die like ordinary people; he wasn't an ordinary person. Let's face it; there's a certain amount of violence — maybe even what people used to call "evil" — inherent in the way the Tyrell Corporation made its money. You're talking about a commercial product — replicants which is perfectly willing to kill to get its freedom, and which gets killed if it tries. One way or another, somebody — or some thing — is going to get hurt. just because it was legal for you to do the hurting when you were still a blade runner doesn't change anything.'
'Spare me the lecture,' said Iris. 'Tell me what happened to Tyrell.'
'Poetic justice. Or karma — what's the difference?' Vogel lifted his shoulders in a shrug. 'One of his replicants, that'd come off the assembly lines right here in this building, came home from the far colonies to have a little talk with its creator. The replicant's name was Roy Batty, and he told Dr Tyrell that he wanted more life. That four years just wasn't long enough, for a creature like him, who was so hungry to survive and taste life. And then when Tyrell couldn't give him any more, things got ugly. Ugly and fatal: the replicant Roy Batty crushed Dr Tyrell's head between his hands like a big egg. Right here in this room.' Vogel had delivered the details in a flat, uninflected monotone. 'That's the way it goes, right? What goes around, comes around. All that built-in, suppressed violence walked in the door, and made itself at home.'
'You seem to know an awful lot about it.' Iris regarded him with even more suspicion than before. 'Like you saw it happen, or something.'
'In a way, you could say I did.' The glow from the massed candles wavered across Vogel's face as he smiled thinly at her. 'Funny thing is, a lot of people saw it. Maybe you're the only one — the only one in all of LA — who didn't.'
'What're you talking about?' The same unease came over her as before, when she and Vogel had been standing outside the ruins they had now penetrated, and he'd pointed out her ignorance of the place and whatever had happened to bring it down. It had been her job to know things other people didn't — you couldn't track down escaped replicants unless you were on top of things — yet there seemed to be whole worlds of which she had known absolutely nothing. 'How many people could have been here in Tyrell's private quarters, to have witnessed him getting killed?'
'No one was here,' said Vogel, still smiling. 'Or just about: the only actual witness was a little nerdy genetic engineer named J. R. Sebastian, who'd worked freelance for Tyrell before. And he got dinged up pretty badly by Roy Batty as well; the initial police report actually had him down as dead also, though that part turned out to be wrong. So other than him, there was only Dr Tyrell and the escaped Batty replicant here in the room when it all went down.'
'All right, then.' Iris spoke with elaborate, barely maintained patience. 'So how could everybody in LA — except me, of course have seen this Batty rep kill Eldon Tyrell?' She gestured around at the wood-paneled walls. 'I don't exactly think that the head of a powerful outfit such as the Tyrell Corporation would allow video bugs to be planted in his private quarters. Execs like that usually have more of a taste for privacy.'
'That they do,' agreed Vogel. 'And Tyrell was more private than most. So it wasn't really here in this room that people got to see Tyrell's gruesome death. Let's say it was as good as here.'
Iris sighed wearily. Vogel's toying around wore her out more than the trek through the buildings' ruins. 'I'm not following you.'
'It was in the studio; that's where it happened. Or at least what everyone saw. Not Tyrell's real death — but as good as. Realer than real, as some might say. The re-creation of Tyrell's death. On tape.'
'Wait a minute.' Iris held up her palm, to stop any more words from coming. 'You're saying somebody made a video production, af
ter the fact, of this Eldon Tyrell getting murdered?'
'You bet.' Vogel gave a single nod. 'Of that, and a whole lot else, besides. An epic, as it were, about this bunch of escaped replicants Roy Batty was part of, and the cop that got assigned the job of tracking down and retiring them. You know the one; the blade runner named Rick Deckard.'
'I've heard the name.' Iris shrugged. 'That's about it, though.'
'Now that's what I was talking about before. There are some real holes in your knowledge of what's been going on here in LA. Or beyond; this thing was broadcast throughout the world, and to the off-planet colonies. Don't you think it's a little curious that you're not aware of it?'
'What was it called?'
'Blade Runner,' said Vogel. 'That's all. Blade Runner.'
'Catchy title.' Iris searched her memory for a couple of seconds, then shook her head. 'Nope. Complete blank on anything like that.'
Vogel peered closer at her. 'And you don't find that strange? I know for a fact that it was pretty popular with a lot of LAPD rank-and-file.'
'No,' said Iris. 'Not really. I don't watch a lot of video stuff, broadcast or otherwise. I don't have time for it.'
'You should still know about this one. It was a big hit, just about everywhere; got very high ratings. And beyond; it's still got quite a cult following.'
'I told you. Never heard of it.'
'So I see.' Vogel's gaze wandered across the candlelit room for a few seconds, then snapped back to Iris. 'Maybe you should watch it some time. Might learn a lot from it.'
She could tell where this was going. 'Maybe I should.'
Vogel's smile widened. 'Now's a good time.' His teeth looked like antique, yellowed ivory in the wavering candlelight. 'Real good.'
