Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  'Not much of a surprise,' said Iris. 'Replicants come in multiples; that's what a production line is all about.' She didn't need to check the slowed pulse of this one; she had spotted the tiny, glacial tick in the vein at the side of the inert body's throat, indicating the same deep state of suspended animation the first one had been sunk into. 'How many duplicates of himself did Eldon Tyrell have his lab run off?'

  'Enough for his purposes.' Carsten continued down the line, unlatching and tilting back the glass lids, revealing a dozen or so Tyrell replicants; Iris lost count as the process continued. He left the last one in the row still closed; standing beside it, he looked at Iris. 'It was a limited production run; we're pretty sure we've accounted for all of them. Our committee had its operatives right inside the Tyrell Corporation, most of them close to Eldon Tyrell himself, so we could keep an eye on what he was up to. When the Tyrell Corporation headquarters building was destroyed, we knew exactly what had to be extracted from the structurally secure chambers inside the ruins. We didn't want to take any chances on these particular items falling into the hands of any Tyrell loyalists — though in fact, we have no idea of whether the shadow corporation elements had any idea of this part of Eldon Tyrell's plans. He was rather a secretive individual — but then, he had a lot to conceal. No one else in the Tyrell Corporation knew what he did. Other than the few lab operatives Eldon Tyrell needed in order to carry out his personal agenda, there was nobody except Tyrell himself who knew the real purpose of the replicant technology. And like some ancient Egyptian pharaoh, murdering the architects of his tomb, once Tyrell had gotten the labor he needed out of those few lab operatives — once he had gotten the replicants for which he had been the original templant — he simply eliminated them. In as fmal a manner as possible. Let's just say that Eldon Tyrell saw no irony in attempting to achieve his own immortality at the price of other people's lives.'

  'I still don't get it.' Even though her target stood a few meters farther away now, Iris kept the gun raised and leveled at his forehead. 'What's the point of running off a batch of physical duplicates of yourself? What would Tyrell have thought he was accomplishing with that? You take 'em out of these boxes and wake 'em up, then four years later they're as dead as anybody else.'

  'Ah. But you see, you're making the same erroneous assumption that so many others make about replicants.' Carsten spread his hands wide, indicating the row of coffins before him, and their eerily similar contents. 'And always have made, since the original, replicant technology was first stolen, and the uses suppressed for which that technology was created. You assume that a production run of replicants, no matter who was the original templant on which they were based, were meant to be created and animated simultaneously.'

  'Well, yeah; of course.' Iris made a slight gesture with the gun in her hand. 'What else? If you're cranking out slave labor, or expendable troops for some suicide military operation, then you're naturally going to put as many as you can into the field, all at the same time. There's no point in rationing them out, not if you're planning on winning whatever battle you're fighting, or getting as many emigrants as possible to sign up and ship out to the far colonies.'

  'No point at all,' agreed Carsten, 'as long as those are the uses to which you're putting the replicant technology. But as I said, the original purpose of the technology is entirely different. If you're using it for purposes of achieving immortality, then the replicants, even if created at the same time, are not animated simultaneously, but sequentially, one after another. A chain of lives, as it were, amounting to one potentially endless life.'

  'Wait a minute.' From over the raised gun, Iris skeptically regarded the old man. let me see if I've got this right. What you're saying is that as one replicant wears out — one of these, let's say' — she nodded toward the sleeping figures in the glass-lidded coffins — 'then the next Eldon Tyrell model in line is animated, or woken up, or whatever you want to call it. And then the next one after that, when its turn comes. All the way down the chain, for however long you want to make it. But so what?' Iris shook her head in exasperation. 'That's not immortality. If the original Eldon Tyrell is dead, he's still dead, whether there's some physical copy of him running around or not.'

  'You're correct about that. The physical copy, in and of itself, is nothing. It is merely the container; the contents are what is important.' Carsten reached down and placed his hand on the brow of one of the figures, deep in its suspended animation. 'It's what is in here that counts, that determines whether the original Eldon Tyrell would be alive or not. Of course, for that to be the case, we must dismiss another erroneous assumption about the nature of the replicant technology. Individuals such as yourself, blade runners and others most concerned about replicants, have always thought that the personalities and minds, even the souls, of the creatures with which you dealt were only fictional constructs, a matter of elaborately developed but still false memories and other gestalt-forming mental contents downloaded into the newly hatched replicants' cerebral cortices. Entire phony biographies written on blank slates, as it were; life histories that seemed real to the replicants, even when they knew logically they were false, that none of the events and emotions they thought they remembered had in reality happened. Perhaps the cruelest deception of all; for no other reason, the replicants might have wished to have had their revenge on their creator. Know thyself is a vicious maxim, when to discover the truth is to discover that one's very nature is a lie.'

  'That's the way it goes,' Iris said. 'Everybody finds out they've been lied to, eventually.'

  'True,' said Carsten. 'And you, and the rest of the blade runners, were certainly lied to when you were informed that the replicants' mental contents, their minds and memories, were necessarily fictional. But they're not; the nature of the container, the physical form, doesn't dictate such falsehoods, anymore than an empty glass dictates that water or wine be poured into it. The glass doesn't care; neither does the blank slate inside a newly created replicant, waiting for information to be inscribed upon it. Truth, to the degree that such exists in this universe, can be placed there just as readily as lies. And that, of course, is what the original purpose of the replicant technology was about: the immortality achieved by transcribing the actual mind and memories, and even the soul, of an original human being into a newly created physical duplicate of that original.'

  'Assuming it could be done,' said Iris, 'why a physical duplicate? If I were Eldon Tyrell, and I wanted my mind and memories and the rest transferred to a new body, I'd certainly want to trade up. Physically, that is.' She nodded toward the withered visage in the coffm-like container closest to her. 'Surely the Tyrell Corporation could come up with something better-looking than that.'

  'Of course it could. But it couldn't be used for what you're talking about. The container might not dictate the contents, truth or a lie, but the contents do dictate the container into which they can be loaded. All Eldon Tyrell's mind and memories were based upon events that happened to a body just like these.' Carsten had taken his hand from the brow of the sleeping replicant; now he gestured with it toward the rest of the figure in the glass-lidded coffin before him. 'To put that mind and those memories — that dark soul — into some nobler, more heroic form would create a fatal discrepancy between the inner gestalt and its new physical manifestation. Believe me, it's been tried; I imagine Eldon Tyrell tried it himself at one time. The best result is total paralysis of the replicant that receives the mismatched download; the usual result is convulsions and death from an overload feedback in the connections between the spine and the major muscle groups.'

  'Okay; scratch that, then.' A few ice crystals had drifted across Iris's hand and the black barrel of the gun; there they looked like minute stars in an inverted night sky. 'It still doesn't strike me as much of a process. What kind of immortality would you get out of this? It's not a chain; it's a loop. Just the same thing over and over again. The same damn Eldon Tyrell, or anybody else, starting up again at the same place
and living his same evil little life once more. But that's not immortality; it's a definition of hell.'

  'So it would be,' said Carsten, 'if that were all there had been to the original replicant technology. But there was more to it than that; much more. What my companies and the others had been trying to achieve was a refutation of the Newtonian law of thermodynamics that so harshly applies to information theory: the one that states that in every exchange some data loss inevitably creeps in.'

  'Not if the information is digitized. Then it's a string of ones and zeros. You can't screw those up.'

  'A typical mistake, to worship the almighty bit.' Carsten's disdain was apparent in his pale eyes. 'You're overlooking the fact that such information, however it is recorded outside of the human body, must still be transcribed back into an analogue container, the raw bloody pulp and gristle of the brain. To get beyond the loop you spoke of, to ensure that Eldon Tyrell or any other physically duplicated person wasn't simply going through the same dismal life over and over again — to achieve an actual cumulative immortality, an ongoing life — then the basic gestalt information would have to be transcribed into and back out of an analogue form that would in fact allow data errors to creep in. Worse: the process would create a cascading error effect. The errors would increase at a geometrical rate, rather than merely an arithmetical one. And of course, the farther back the information in the individual's biography, the more contaminated by error it would become every time it was transcribed into and out of the fallible, fleshy recording medium. Only the most recently recorded information, the events that had happened to the most recent, previous replicant in the sequential chain, would be even relatively free of such transcription error; everything else would be progressively lost to a deepening dementia and progressive loss of fundamental memory — leading to what my own company's psychiatric technicians termed "gestalt collapse", the catastrophic implosion of all personality-based functioning, similar to a building crumbling in on itself due to the erosion of its foundation. When that happens, it doesn't matter how fresh and well-preserved the top floor is; it goes along with the rest.'

  'Congratulations,' said Iris sourly. 'You've just proven that this whole immortality shtick could never work.'

  'On the contrary; I have merely shown you what the problem is, what my company and the others were working on before the replicant technology was stolen from us. We knew very well what we were up against; we were attempting to defeat entropy itself, the inevitable principle of disorganization and loss of form that is a constant throughout the universe. The cruel part of having our work stolen from us is how close we had come to our goal.'

  'How close is that?'

  'Close enough so Eldon Tyrell was able to grasp the prize that had been inches from our fingers.' The seething resentment sparked brighter in Carsten's eyes. 'Close enough for others, whether the UN emigration program or whoever has been working with the escaped replicants, to have realized he had managed to create the last missing piece of the puzzle. To have achieved true physical immortality, using a sequential chain of replicants for which he had been the templant, without the entropic decay of the gestalt-forming contents of his mind and memories. And having put the puzzle together at last, Eldon Tyrell had become too dangerous to live. Somebody — some agency, some force, some entity, either from outside or from within his own circle of confederates, even possibly from within the Tyrell Corporation itself — decided that rather than allowing him to live forever, it had become imperative he die. Immediately.' Carsten folded his arms across his chest. 'And so it was arranged.'

  Iris could see the pieces of the other puzzle assembling themselves. 'Through the Batty replicant.'

  'Just so,' replied Carsten. 'Somebody took the necessary steps, from the far colonies all the way to Los Angeles, to make sure that a murderous escaped replicant would be able to reach the Tyrell Corporation headquarters in LA, penetrate its defense systems with laughable ease, as well as be coached in the one cover story that would distract Eldon Tyrell from alerting the security agents who would have been seconds away from coming to his aid. Instead of immortality, all that Eldon Tyrell wound up with was an endless future as a skull-crushed corpse, until such time as his bones were blown away by dust.'

  'Now you've lost me again.' Iris gestured with the gun she held aimed at the old man. 'What would it matter if the Batty replicant killed Tyrell? You said he had already created the missing piece to the puzzle, some way of using a sequential chain of physical doubles of himself, replicants modeled after his templant — but with some kind of cumulative mind and personality which didn't decay and fall apart the way it otherwise would. And he had done so to the point that these other mysterious forces you're talking about, that had been somehow keeping track of what he was up to, would have known he had succeeded in achieving a method of immortality. That's why they sent the Batty replicant to knock him off. But what's the problem with that?' She made a dismissive flick to one side with the gun's dark barrel; ice crystals shook from her numb hand and drifted down onto the face of the Eldon Tyrell figure in the glass-lidded coffin before her. 'It just means that the lifespan of his original physical body got terminated a little earlier, and maybe a little more uncomfortably, than he had been expecting to happen. So what? He'd already had the next links in the sequential chain made up; they're lying right here in front of us. And if he had the magic key ready also, the way of getting the contents of his head into his replicant double without any information decay, then whatever Tyrell Corporation flunkey he would've had standing by in case of emergencies like this — and of course he had one; paranoid guy, right? — then that flunkey could've pulled the switch or whatever was involved and done the job. And Eldon Tyrell would've been up and running again, mean and ugly as ever. Why didn't that happen?'

  'There's a lot of reasons it could have failed to happen.' Carsten looked unimpressed with her arguments. 'Primarily, due to Eldon Tyrell having been surrounded by far more conspirators and traitorous elements, right inside his own corporation, than he had any notion of. Whoever had been designated with the responsibility of "throwing the switch," as you put it, could have been one of those traitors. Let's face it, Eldon Tyrell hardly had the kind of charisma that inspired universal loyalty among his employees. Any one of them might have preferred to see him as a corpse rather than as an animated replicant. One has to be careful about making enemies; they tend to multiply in the dark, like insects. However, as much as something like that could have or should have happened to Eldon Tyrell, it is not in fact what occurred. His death — his true death, all chance of immortality gone — wasn't accomplished by the mere failure to throw the switch that would have put the transcription of his mind and memories into a waiting replicant receptacle. That would have been too easy — and not nearly final enough. For, of course, if the transcription that had been made of his mind and memories still existed, who could say the switch might not have been thrown later?' Carsten shook his head. 'Better to make sure Eldon Tyrell stayed dead. After all, it's what the Batty replicant wanted, as well as the conspirators who arranged for his passage to LA. And the only way to do that was to destroy the channel by which the transference of information, from the dead Tyrell to the new replicant Tyrell, was to have been made. And that's exactly what the Batty replicant did.'

  Iris regarded the old man sidelong once more; the creepily fervent tone had crept into his reedy voice again. 'Yeah?' She was glad she had the gun hanging in her numb hand between herself and Carsten. 'How'd he do that?'

  'You already saw how it was done,' said Carsten. 'You saw the Blade Runner movie. And it wasn't just a movie: as your friend Vogel told you, it was in fact the actual taped record of what happened. So the way you saw Eldon Tyrell die in the film — the way you saw the Batty replicant kill him — was the way Eldon Tyrell did indeed die; in reality, in the world as we know it. You understand that, don't you?'

  'Sure.' Ice crystals sifted from Iris's close-cropped hair down the back of her neck
. 'I've got the picture.'

  'I'm sure you do. I'm sure you're watching it right now, on the screen of your memory:And you can in fact see — in all its red detail - the whole sequence of Batty's murder of Tyrell. Am I right?'

  Iris made no reply. The mere mention of the sequence had been enough to bring it up vividly inside her head, with no necessity for her to close her eyes to appreciate its somber beauties. She had felt no distaste the first time she had seen it, on the much larger and external screen of the private theater in what had been Tyrell's personal quarters in the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation building in LA. Watching the sequence again, in her memory, produced no new queasiness. Only a death, Iris told herself. Exactly like others she had seen, like others she herself had been responsible for. The only difference was the hands-on nature of this one; literally so. She watched, in memory, as Batty's hands settled on either side of his creator's age-creased head.

  'A very detailed shot, isn't it?' From down the row of glass-lidded coffins, Carsten's thin voice hectored at her. 'When the makers of the film edited down the shots from the concealed video cameras, they went for the tight close-up, to make sure that we could see exactly what happened. What the Batty, replicant did to Tyrell, other than simply kill him. Tell me; what do you see? What did happen then? What did the movie show?'

  'The hands . . .' Iris spoke slowly, as the images unreeled in similar motion in her thoughts. 'And Tyrell's head . . .'

  'The hands, yes; very good.' Carsten leaned forward above the coffin closest to him, watching her as intently as might any bird of prey. 'And the thumbs . . . Batty's thumbs . . .'

  His words seemed to be coming from infinitely far away, like the faint cry of some winged creature circling in a cloudless sky above. She could barely hear him, though she knew precisely what he had said to her. His thumbs. Iris could see them, the exact small motion pressing into Tyrell's face, and the blood that had welled up from beneath them.