Replicant Night (36 page)

"Good for you." Deckard's words had left Marley unfazed. "That must be why you got picked for this job you're doing. Guilty consciences screw up people's heads, make 'em easy to manipulate. Like you. Otherwise, if you were thinking straight, you would've been able to figure out a few things about the situation you're in."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Work on it, Deckard." The other man leaned closer across the table. "You think because I've said I want to stop you-to make sure you
don't
get that briefcase and its data out to the insurgents-you think that must mean I'm with the authorities. Have you ever thought that it's exactly the authorities- the police, the U.N., whatever-who want you to get that briefcase out to where you've been told it's supposed to be delivered?"

"Hey!" The voice of Roy Batty piped up from beneath the table. "Don't listen to this guy! He's trouble!"

Deckard glanced over to the monitor screen, where the Deckard of the video, still wearing the actor's face, was talking to somebody in a set that was supposed to be the LAPD's high-ceilinged main headquarters. He didn't hear the characters' words, concentrating instead on what the figure across from him had just said.

"Look at it this way," continued Marley. "The cable monopoly here does whatever the authorities tell it to do-that's why it gets to remain a monopoly. If U.N. security tells the monopoly to run this video or that one, or
that
one"-he pointed to the screen-"then it gets broadcast all over the colony. Same way with Urbenton and his little Speed Death Productions company; if he wasn't in tight with the police before, it wouldn't take much pressure, if any, before he'd do whatever they tell him to. Especially since he doesn't owe you any favors. If they told him to cut the computer graphic effects, the dubbing in of your face over the actor who was playing you-he'd do it in a second. Urbenton wouldn't care if it helped you or hurt you; just the kind of guy he is."

Deckard had to admit that Marley was right, at least as far as that part of the analysis went. "I think I'm starting to see what you mean..."

"I bet you are. You're not totally stupid, Deckard. If the police and the U.N.

security forces and everybody else who should be after you, if all those people wanted to find you and stop you from carrying that briefcase out to the insurgents, they wouldn't have let that actor's face stay in the video that's being broadcast. They would've told Urbenton to go ahead with his original production plans and dub your face in there. So that everybody in the emigrant colony would know what you look like; so they could put out a bulletin, offer a little reward, and there would've been no place you could hide. We wouldn't be sitting in this cozy little hole having this conversation; the police would've hauled your ass away by now."

It made sense; or put another way, the video broadcast didn't.
This was their chance
, thought Deckard,
to make sure everybody knows what I look like
. And it hadn't happened. The corollary of the principle that, for him, everything happened for a reason-not paranoia but wisdom, a survivor's assessment of how the universe worked-was that when things didn't happen, that was also because somebody wanted it that way.

"Then that would mean..." Deckard slowly picked through his own words. "It would mean the authorities don't want to stop me. They don't want to catch me..."

"They
want
you to get away." On the other side of the table, Marley regarded him with evident satisfaction, pleased with the impact his arguments had made. "So the question you have to ask yourself now is . . . why?"

"Why do they want me to get away..." Deckard rubbed his mouth with a knuckle. "They must have a reason..."

"It's not you, pal." Marley seemed to be taking pity on him. "If it's any comfort to you-nobody's ever considered you to be that important. So you needn't bother building up your ego now. It's what you're carrying. The job you've undertaken. Got it?" He smiled. "It's the briefcase. They want you to deliver it. Not the rep-symps, but the authorities. The police, the U.N... all of them. The bad guys."

"I told you!" Batty's voice shouted louder from beneath the table. The briefcase vibrated against Deckard's shin. "I told you this guy was trouble. He's messing with your mind. Don't listen to him!"

The Rachael child leaned to one side in order to talk to the briefcase. "It's okay," she said in a soothing tone. "Nothing bad's going to happen to you-"

"Christ," spoke Batty disgustedly. "I don't need this. You people are all screwing up big-time. Man, I wish I still had legs. I'd walk out of here right now and take my chances on my own. I'd let you all just sit here until you rotted away."

"Shut up." Deckard resisted the impulse to give the briefcase another kick. "Problem is, the guy's making sense."

"That's not a problem." A smile and a shake of Marley's head. "It's your salvation, Deckard."

"Goddamn it, don't listen-"

Batty's voice had gone up enough in volume to require action. Angrily, Deckard reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling the briefcase up and slamming it down hard on the table. He looked around to see if anyone in the place had noticed; as far as he could discern, the bartender and the patrons scattered among the tables were still watching the dimly lit adventures of the re-created Deckard in the video.

"Listen up," said Deckard, laying his hand on top of the briefcase's lid. "You're getting on my nerves. You keep yelling and carrying on, somebody's bound to think that's a little unusual. And I don't really feel like attracting attention right now. Understand?"

"You're the one who doesn't understand." Batty's voice had turned sulky. "You got a job to do, and this asshole is getting in the way."

"I don't care what I agreed to do." He pulled his hand back. "Just shut up and let me work this out, or so help me, I'll leave you at the nearest pawnshop and I'll take the two bucks I'll get for you and spend it on aspirin. I'm not joking."

The briefcase said nothing. It radiated a silent, sullen fury.

"Good call." Marley nodded approvingly. "You're the one in charge. Remember that-"

"Fine." The anger boiling up in Deckard hadn't abated. "I'm in charge? Then I want answers. I want to know what's going on. Right now, without any more cute shit from you."

"All right." Marley laid both his large-boned hands on the table. "I'll give you the short-and-sweet version, if you think your little mind can handle it. The briefcase here" - he tapped on it with one fingernail - "It's not what you think it Is. It's not what you've been told."

"Yeah? So what Is it, then?"

Marley smiled coldly at him. "You're carrying a bomb."

Deckard sighed wearily. "The hell I am." He had been hoping for something more plausible than that. "The authorities supposedly want me to carry this briefcase out to the replicant insurgents-because it's some kind of bomb? Get real."

"I
am
real." Marley's smile didn't change. "This is as real as it gets."

"Come on." Deckard pointed to the briefcase. "How much damage could be accomplished with something this size? And it came to me virtually empty; even if it were packed with high explosives-Christ, even if it'd been shoved full of fissionable materials-how much of a bang do you think that would amount to? Not enough to destroy a rebellion that's spread across all the U.N. colonies out in the stars. You're talking some big distances there, and a
lot
of replicants. If this so-called bomb killed thousands of them-even hundreds of thousands-that wouldn't change anything." He shook his head in disgust. "How about you figuring something out? Tell me-why would the authorities go to this much trouble just to enable me to carry one piddly bomb out there? Doesn't make sense."

"Oh ... it might." Marley shrugged. "Depends on what kind of bomb it is, doesn't it? Problem with you cop types, all you can ever think of are things that go boom. Little boom, you kill one person; big boom, and you kill lots. But that's as far as your imagination goes. There are some things that don't go boom at all, and they kill all the people you need to."

"For Christ's sake." Batty's voice came from the briefcase. "The guy's a liar, and he's not even a good one."

Deckard ignored the disembodied words. "So you'd like me to believe that there's some kind of biological agent in this thing. A virus, a bacterium... some kind of disease vector. And my taking it out to the insurgents would somehow introduce that disease into their population and wipe them out. Is that it?" He felt even more disgusted, considering the shallowness of the concocted story. "It doesn't wash. That makes even less sense. One, replicant genetics are based upon their human originals, like the way the replicant Roy Batty was based upon the human Batty who got stuck in this box. So the replicant population is as genetically diverse as the human population, so the chance of coming up with a disease that would cut a wide enough swath through the insurgents is just about zero. And second, even if you could come up with a disease like that, some kind of superbug, it would almost certainly be just as deadly for the humans out there in the colonies. The U.N. authorities aren't going to wipe out all their emigrants in order to take care of the insurgents- what would be the point?"

"You know, Deckard, you're kind of a wordy bastard. For a cop, that is."

"I get inspired," he replied sourly, "when I think somebody's trying to bulishit me. You want a third? I'll give it to you for free. Replicants have four-year life spans. You don't have to do
anything
to kill them off, let alone introduce some bio-engineered disease. If all the U.N. wanted to do was to eliminate them en masse, it would just have to outwait them, let 'em come to the ends of their own built-in ropes."

"Very good." Marley smiled and nodded in admiration. "Not bad arguments for somebody who's under the kind of pressure you are. You make some big assumptions, though. You're underestimating both how scared and how ruthless the U.N. can be. The insurgents have them in a panic; they'd happily kill off the entire human emigrant population if that's what it took to knock the replicants down. They can always get more emigrants; how much rottener does life have to get on Earth before everybody's lined up to go? There's already a nice little bottleneck full of 'em right here on Mars, just waiting for their tickets out. And as for the business about the replicants and their four-year life spans Marley shook his head. "Maybe that's not quite the issue that you think it is. But the main thing is that you're just wrong. You're wrong about what you think I'm trying to tell you. I never said the briefcase had some kind of disease agent inside it. You're just jumping to your own conclusions way too fast, Deckard. Maybe you should learn to just sit back and listen for a change."

"All right." Deckard leaned his shoulder blades into the booth's padding. "I'm listening."

"When I said you were carrying a bomb, I didn't mean the kind that goes boom, or something full of nasty little bacteria and viruses." The smile had evaporated from Marley's face. "I'm talking a
memetic
bomb. Pure information that changes what people do-in this case, what replicants do. When you were told that there was important data imbedded in the briefcase, that wasn't a lie. That's all there is inside it. And that's enough. Enough to take care of the insurgent replicants."

"'Memetic bomb'? What's that supposed to mean?" Deckard gazed at the other man in disbelief. "You're talking about a meme? Just some kind of idea, and that's all? I suppose it's some really bad one-something like 'Why don't we all just commit suicide? It's fun and it's easy.' And that bad idea is just somehow going to infect the replicant insurgents, they'll kill themselves, and the U.N. 's troubles will be over. You must be joking. You have to be."

"No..." Marley actually looked sad. "I wish I were."

The shift in the other man's attitude made Deckard un easy. "What is it, then? What good is a meme as a weapon if the replicants could just come up with a countermeme for it? Because that's all it would take. Any idea, bad or good, isn't something that people have to obey without even thinking about it. It's not like a bullet-or a real bomb. You don't get to argue about those."

"Guns have triggers," said Marley. "So do bombs; the things that make them go off. That's what you don't argue with. When the triggers get pulled, things happen. Real bad things. When the meme is the trigger-a trigger for something that already exists inside the target-then that completes the bomb as soon as you bring the two together. And that's what you'd be doing by taking that briefcase out to the insurgents. The bomb that would go off isn't some bad idea, some little self-destructive notion, that they'd be able to argue with. It's something that's built into them, just like those false memories that the Tyrell Corporation implanted into them. It's already in their heads, Deckard, where they can't get at it. They don't even know it's there. But they would as soon as you showed up with that briefcase and the data inside it. What the insurgents out there believe would be a list of the disguised replicants on Earth, their fifth column that they could contact and bring in on their side-they'd have a big surprise coming. It wouldn't be any list. It'd be their death warrants that you'd delivered to them. And they'd take care of the killing by themselves." The smile, when it appeared this time, was a mordant twist in one corner of his mouth. "That's a pretty good bomb, wouldn't you say?"

More than one change; the other man's voice had gone deadly cold as well. "How does it work?" Deckard was almost ready to believe. "What is it inside the replicants' heads?"

"Remember what I said about the four-year life span's not being an issue anymore? That's got a lot to do with it." Marley leaned across the table. "The replicants have changed. Because of being out there. Out in the stars, so far away from Earth. That's what the Tyrell Corporation was afraid would happen, and what the U.N. authorities have found out to be true. That's what started up the rebellion, made the replicants think they had something worth fighting for. Their own lives. And not just some crummy little scrap with a built-in cutoff date. In the outer colonies, that's what started happening: the replicants began spontaneously living longer than the four years they were intended to live. They changed. They're still changing."