THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (19 page)

Clay Eastwood knew one thing: that his position wasn’t about power – this thought abided in the world’s most powerful man. It was the hard lesson that democracy had taught him no less so than here at the pinnacle. He also knew that any truth can be circumvented by the successful conniver. He had himself engaged in these practises through a belief in the rightness and the principle of his action and that it had less to do with himself than it might appear. His positions didn’t shift and they were out there for all to see so that he could justify what he did for their sake. You could tear a man down for what was right even if it was ultimately proved wrong, as long as it was out there in public view. Clay Eastwood projected a compelling presence that wasn’t about to flinch. He wouldn’t abide a big-brained cockroach with a nature ever in the shadow, not if it came in the way of his foot.

It was an embarrassment, as he’d said, that the party had been unable to fumigate. Memories were short except in the instances where they were long. And this was one of them. Long on both sides of the aisle for their own reasons. With what went on in the past continuing to fill its veins, even progress won’t prove an antidote.

The whiskeys arrived. One server managed the task, and withdrew.

“Gentlemen, to your health!”

“To your health, Mr. President.”

Clay Eastwood sipped and set down his tumbler; and then fixed them with a gaze that passed through still upraised cut crystal.

The blue-centred stars of the President’s eyes didn’t strike Virgil in themselves so much as their highly charged concentration. Was the man aware of their power? Or were his eyes no more than a serendipitously impressive construct, the import of their god-like fixity merely decorative. Did they speak to an inner state of being substantially different and possibly at odds with Virgil’s own? Usually he considered himself as aligning to the general human run of things, fluid in nature, where persons experience each other with an ease that is interchangeable, common, and empathetic. A Clay Eastwood challenged the whole view, as he sat there, a completely separate entity, concrete and immoveable in character and identity, an original. He provided leadership that one followed if only to uncover his secret – ever a fool’s errand when it came to the compulsions of presence. Analogous to the fine whiskey that Virgil continued to sip and that was subtly acting on his perceptions.

“Twenty years in the barrel,” the President murmured with helpful pride. “Jason, why don’t you brief Virgil as to what this is all about and what we’d like of him!”

Clay Eastwood bent his head and waited, his salt and pepper locks no longer in constant need of the trim whose subliminal message had caused so much froth on the campaign trail. – “Friends, a haircut is the last thing on my mind. Time enough for that.”

“We suspect,” began Jason. “Sorry, we know,” he corrected himself in response to a presidential grunt, “that this Rove character is responsible for what happened to Humphrey. How he did it is another matter. He could very well have been driving the car himself, in some capacity or other, that is.”

Jason’s eyes flickered toward the President, anticipating another objection. When none came, he returned momentarily to the consternation on Virgil’s face before speaking into the middle distance. Follow me in this, spoke his manner.

“The thing of it is, as you may or may not know, Rove the man – the human – is dead, recently dead. Made it to a hundred as a matter of fact.”

“Must have been to test us,” interjected Clay Eastwood with a theological tone out of some apparent need to justify the ways of providence. With a wave of the hand, “Continue, Jason!” he bid.

“Stubborn, I’d say,” muttered an unreclaimed Jason, atheistically laying down his own marker, “and lived long enough to make himself a problem once again.”

“How so?” asked Virgil deciding to enter into the perilously structured narrative, and added, suddenly not wishing to see the President embarrassed, “I have heard it said, Mr. President, that it is the tough ones that make it to your desk.”

His effort opened an opportunity for Jason to seed his own non sequitur.

“You’d be surprised at the number of memorials and funerals a President attends.”

“Never mind that, Jason. Politics make it necessary. Go on.” Another wave of the hand.

“Sorry, Mr. President. As I was saying…where was I…the old fart Rove dies…” He paused for Clay Eastwood to give him absolution.

“I will allow that.”

“…dies and yet doesn’t die since he manages before the end to get as much of himself as he can into one of Humphrey’s latest units, don’t ask how! We suspect that Humphrey’s competitive curiosity had prevailed since similar work is going on elsewhere in the world – we believe that he found out the breach and intended to pull the plug. He had no love for Rove and, like most liberals, would have relished this guilt-free opportunity for retribution. Laws don’t apply here. Nothing illegal about killing a man who’s already dead. Needless to say events turned out quite differently. Quite the opposite from what Humphrey planned. As for Rove, what he purposed…”

This time, in the middle of his own speech, it is Jason himself who raises a forestalling hand.

“…and those who conspired with him, who knows, but it would seem obvious enough in the near term. Some would say he was reluctant to meet his Maker. Illogical on more than one front.”

A chortle from Clay Eastwood.

“A lot like that I expect.”

“It was always power alone that interested Rove, and made him feel alive. If he continued to have it, he’d be cheating death. – Hell, he’d been cheating it more than most. – And his disciples don’t want to lose his way of thinking and his guidance as long as they can have it. For him, what better validation is there? He’s reborn and among us still.”

Jason stopped before the theological parallel. He had stated the facts and wasn’t about to involve himself in a self-inflicted challenge to his lack of belief.

Mildly amused by Jason’s bringing himself up short like this, Virgil did ponder his words although not so much the final comment. Why, in this place, did they quiver before a humanoid?

“Guidance?” he at last chose to ask.”It’s…”

“…just a humanoid, we know, but one with his way of thinking, his way of doing, his history and his influences. It could very well be the same as the original and more so. And who is to say that it’s not in every sense that counts the original Rove?”

“Still…”

“His mind in a humanoid with unlimited resources and computational powers. Is it capable of affecting other humanoids? Apparently. Can it reproduce itself? Why not. Each one as powerful as the last. And subject to what control?”

Voice something and you alter everything, Still it seemed ridiculous to Virgil that he should feel this sense of impotence here of all places. Clay Eastwood, the President, sat in his chair as though propped there, stuffed with sand that trickled beneath his desk from a tear somewhere on his person. Jason sweated around the collar, having strained to pull a plough, as he tried to get the information out of his system. The presidential seal, large and decorative, meant to remind not reassure, hung in front of the desk. Better to wait, Virgil counselled himself, and see what came next.

An exasperated tone came from Jason that didn’t quite hide a sense of personal defeat – surprising to Virgil who recalled him as technologically adept. “You and the humanoid Humphrey sent you. We’d like to see what will come, if we return her to you. Apparently, she won’t listen to anyone else. She’s saying that the password is her relationship with you. Ironic, isn’t it? Humphrey’s most sophisticated creation has bonded to you. You’re its mother duck. All we can get out of her is details about you. Not very interesting. We’re asking for your help, Virgil.”

Clay Eastwood looked at his watch; he wasn’t about to await a possible refusal.

“Thank you in advance, Virgil.” He had risen from his chair. “We probably won’t be meeting again about this. Do as you think best,” he added in an expansive meaningful spirit. Virgil was also on his feet, shaking the President’s extended hand, the shadowy figure of Jason attentive beside him ready to lead him out.

“It’s been an honour, Mr. President.”

Afterwards he congratulated himself for repressing the words that came to mind: “You can count on me.”

Chloé awaited him in the garage, in the backseat of a limousine.

Jason leaned down to the window that Virgil lowered for him. “No hard feelings” were his last words at the last moment.

Virgil allowed himself to rise above it all, buoyed as it were by the occasion, and went so far as to set aside his rough treatment. He would invest faith in the staying power of compunction.

“I’m not sure what I can do.”

Jason proffered his hand and Virgil shook it. The car moved off with the sound of the window going up. He settled back next to a complacent Chloé, envious at her show of alert indifference. No harm done to her. What would have been the point? He could see no marks and didn’t expect to. As for Molly, hadn’t it been a dead man whose malevolence had reached her?

Two agents who kept to a distance alternately watched over them, the one spelling the other according to their own rhythms. As instructed by Jason he didn’t interact. Eventually, their dark-clothed presence no longer alarmed him in the way that they had the first week or two. They did, from the beginning, make him feel special and they at last became a part of the reassuring background of his daily life. He assumed whatever was the danger had passed him by and, settling once more into complacency, went on as before despite the jagged edge that remained on his sense of things. He made Chloé privy to all the information he had received, but she effectively drew a blank in her response to it, disconcerting him when she asked,

“Shall I keep the file active?”

She performed, in the place of Molly, with piquant additional qualities, as his personal assistant. He did enjoy the upgrade since she didn’t come with a different set of desires, a mysterious new arrangement of priorities, as would a human. He hadn’t to accommodate himself, even while continuing to be mildly troubled that he was not making the best use of her.
Plus ça change
. Did a Porsche atrophy if it were only driven to the grocery store?

In the end, the dwarfing effect of the city arranged his attitude towards the security detail. On a smaller stage the two men would have annoyed and encumbered him, weighed down upon his comings and goings, cartons of milk under his arm, rendered his aimless walk in the early morning even more threadbare as he unavoidably attended to them, but, in the context of the city, their permanent lookout disconnectedly on his trail was a luxury, a guarantee of sorts against harm. He wouldn’t be mugged; he didn’t need to look about him at night. They were two rough-cut jewels that belonged to him in the human throng.

For her own safety, Chloé would always be with him, at his side, svelte and waif-like: perfectly straight trim legs; sandalled feet kissing the ground; the clingy silk shift cut above the knee and below the breast bone; the unevenly layered hair. Her toenails gave her away with their polished surface concentrating the sunlight. Everyone must know what she was, for that is where the curious eye would fall – or was it that he couldn’t shake off his self-consciousness and she did, in fact, pass human muster?

Chloé performed the same harmonious role as her predecessor. She responded to his every requirement whereby she studied to adapt herself to his tastes and to his manner; she was subtle in her presence, as much an adornment as a tool. Her speech delighted him; he had her draw upon the movie intonations of an old Australian actress he favoured whose distinctive accent shaped her utterances with both chillness and warmth – he had always wanted to have her speak to him and him alone.

In a way that they hadn’t with Molly, his interests more and more focused upon her, his apprehension of Chloé favouring her with a sentiment that he attributed to a harmless bit of mental play on his part. “All the world being a stage” allowed for a theatrical suspension of disbelief. If all is illusion, as some claim, then why not add another man-made illusion into the mix? One could hardly help it, could one?

He took to taking her hand when on the street, with the conviction that they created an impression of an ordinary loving couple out for a walk. Under the sway of her attractions, it seemed the normal thing to do. The touch of her responsive silicon skin and the delicate fingers pressing into his palm, as vulnerable as anything living, generated pleasurable frissons that wandered through him on the way to his heart. Did they reach that tender sanctum? It was the easier course for him to allow them. One could love all manner of things, he told himself, why not one’s lovely and apparently loving humanoid, so far superior to the assortment of inanimate objects that generate affection? He chose not to think of the love that some humans waste upon each other.

They would ensconce themselves on a park bench, empty-minded, not having to think. He would consult when necessary should an idea come to him; when not, he would watch the ducks in the water – a pleasant diversion – or the strollers ambling by, and he would effortlessly analyze the clues they presented toward some greater understanding of the flux in the order of things. Feeling foolish whether he did so or he didn’t, he would put his arm about her shoulder.