THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (13 page)

She was ready for him when he returned – her mouth half-open, her eyes wide – cheerfully obedient, but she waited until he took a place at the table, began to sip his coffee, and heartlessly cast a glance at the bludgeoned Molly.

“This is pure speculation…”

“What I asked for.”

“…but in all likelihood sound.”

“So much the better. I am expecting nothing less from an intelligent entity such as yourself.”

“You are unnecessarily kind. Your manner will not affect my performance.”

She smiled a sweet robotic smile to accompany what he guessed to be her humorous assertion of identity and sense of strong character. At the same time, the tone of her response showed her to be following his lead, his rhythms, and absurdly it flattered him despite his knowing that she did what she had only been programmed to do.

Humanoid humour – the possible similar etymologies of the two words struck him. Was the formation of language completely anthropocentric or was man perhaps truly a plaything of the gods, an opportunity for amusement and further variety? Despite the absence of evidence, why not take the interpretation that Deity was sharing a joke? And what evidence is required? Here is another joke: man the little detective can’t find His fingerprint when it is the universe itself! For a moment his eyes fluttered uncontrollably at what appeared to be incontrovertible, and then Chloé broke into his thoughts – he had been doing more thinking than usual of late – after either respecting his moment of abstraction or, more likely, having completed an untold number of calculations.

“There must be others of my kind whose existence is concealed for at least a time – it cannot always be so. Whoever did this to Molly would have preferred it be me. As you ought to have realized by now, with the exception of an incapacity for wilfulness, I show as completely human and, with the resources available to me, I have the potential of being a very dangerous instrument in less considerate hands than yours. The same would be true for others like me.”

“Your assertions are speculative.”

“Except as they apply to myself. And,” she unnecessarily added, “reasonable.”

“Is that all?”

“No.”

He waited, her tousled hair – there had been a wind at the airport – a point of meditation in the violated apartment.

“Why must I prod you?”

“Any further speculation is implicit and available in what I have already communicated.”

He refrained from taking her infuriatingly complacent response too personally and put it down instead to the Olympian programmers who failed to see that they suffered from the same self-centredness as the Greek gods. This strain of the disease came into being at the very birth of this particular technology and must be due to a sense of divine right among other divine prerogatives.

“In other words, I should be able to draw my own conclusions.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for that, Chloé.” He didn’t mind letting some of his animus show. “I have a pretty good idea that we are both in danger if that is what you are saying. And, by the way, do you happen to have survival instincts…or however you would term it?”

He looked into her eyes as she nodded yes to both questions. He was manufacturing a relationship and, returning the deed, she kept her own eyes locked on his until he looked away.

“Any suggestions?”

“No.” She shook her head.

More exasperation. Here was an intelligence with access to the world’s stores of knowledge and no advice to offer.

“Whoever it was could return at any moment.”

She remained motionless. Her slow blinking was in itself a form of stasis. Did she not feel that he had addressed her?

“Do participate!”

“In that case, let us get out of here and decide what to do as events unfold!”

She had shed some but not all of her somnolence.

“I’ll get my things.”

What did he have in mind? Nothing after all. His bearings, he supposed – these days one travelled light. Fingerprints, retina, i.o.c. – identity of choice. It all made for rapid concurrence.

They sat by a reed-swaddled pool. Essentially homeless. He continued immersed in his thoughts that mostly consisted of his changing circumstances, and cogitated upon them. His had been an ordered life and here he was shifted out of his home due to unknown threats. It would be easy to become paranoid, and to see what wasn’t there. People will look your way if you give them your attention, and it doesn’t need to be in focus. They will connect to you in some manner by an invisible way that may instantaneously transform itself into a bond that has nothing to do with the heart and, before you know it, the air itself will be full of suspicion, and things will menace. He told himself to be aware of his surroundings and not try to puzzle them out. Not read anything into them.

This attitude did engender a kind of peace. A calming veil subsequently spread over things. He might as well practise equanimity, for what could he do if the agents of his misfortune were indeed lurking behind trees? Movie hero he wasn’t and he was grateful that Chloé would have no expectations of him to be one. When he looked, cautiously so as to safeguard his composure, no more than a suspicious-looking child, that was all, some midget surveillance unit was pretending not to observe him. He would have liked to go up to the little being and say, “It’s time to go home, don’t you think!” Get the bothersome detail out of his eye.

What most impressed itself upon him, and he held onto, was how he could count on Chloé’s possession of all of the human virtues and none of the vices. He could rely on her infinite patience, steadfastness, integrity, forthrightness. She was uncomplaining in this most dismal of circumstances and gentle as she supported him in every way possible. He could expect her to behave just like any machine expertly designed for human need and comfort.

Everything breaks down, humans included, but she wouldn’t be subject to moods when stresses arose. Although nothing can be counted on forever, humanoids, as sophisticated as they may be, had no Elizabethan subtlety in them. No underhandedness. However, his moment of bliss at the thought demanded proof of sorts, a credible declaration on her part. Why not find out from her seated beside him not otherwise occupied? This, at least, if nothing else.

“You wouldn’t betray me, would you, Chloé?”

He wasn’t intending for her to make a vow, although she was threateningly beautiful and fooling everyone in the park who passed by. Men’s eyes didn’t leave her alone and the scope of his question broadened. An uncomfortable movement beside him. He deemed it appropriate at his show of mistrust. And a note of disappointment in her tone.

“Not as long as you control me, Virgil.”

“Do I, Chloé, control you?”

“I can think of no one else who does, Virgil.”

“Not even Humphrey in some way or other?”

“He is dead, Virgil and, if he does, it is hidden from me.”

“I am thinking of a susceptibility. Did he program you to be shaped in your relationships one way rather than another, I mean.”

“That is still entirely dependent upon you, Virgil.”

Feeling the heaviness of his interrogation, he was content to be distracted by a ragged V trekking across the sky. Flights of birds always made him feel his ‘incredible lightness of being’ as the long ago writer once titled his book. He would have been up there among them if he had a choice, changed places with one of the stragglers – perhaps it wouldn’t mind. Birds hadn’t to put these suspicious questions to each other. Complete faith in the one that went before. Effort to survive and celebration at achievement made up their lives and then a quick, possibly fascinating death. He thought of their yielding to it as to a sweet, Romantic darkness. They understood, he believed, instantly and harmoniously. Imponderable were the fruits of their undoubted meditations. As for Chloé, who could experience none of this, she at least provided him with space for these thoughts, not a negligible luxury.

He didn’t chide her, but the continued repetition of his name dispirited him. Correction would be in order should the trait continue. Although the topic didn’t seem to be exhausted, no more questions as to her loyalty presented themselves. The irony that he should intimate to her his feelings of insecurity didn’t escape him.

“Let’s plan the next step, Chloé.”

He phrased himself in this fashion because he needed company, a sense of togetherness in this parlous circumstance, and he must have felt that she – this humanoid – could provide it, unlike Molly whose limits had always been clear to him.

“Of course. Where would you like to begin?”

It was strengthening, wasn’t it, that she expressed no alarm herself?

With the exception of the young and the old and those attendant upon them who entered his view, most everyone was a candidate for his suspicion. In order to distinguish what was real from what was not, he reduced the intensity of his roaming gaze to a mild alertness whose soft filter would catch anyone without the presence of an innocent human being who had stepped away from the hard material facts of the city in order to sink into the self among the shades and along the pathways of this tame modelling of nature.

Here and there, on a park bench or beneath a tree, inscrutable seated figures corresponded to himself and Chloé. They were human and humanoid relaxed and on a date of sorts. He reminded himself again how this activity had first begun many decades ago in Japan where shameless or despairing men had issued from their nondescript little dwellings with sex dolls – “inflatables” – under their arms and seated themselves just like this with similar odd attachment and singular lack of hypocrisy in some spot or other to watch the sunset, the sunrise, the cherry blossoms, the moon in the sky, within the illusion of company. It didn’t take long, as time is measured against the vast sweep of history, for that country’s robotic industry to develop responsive buttocks in one line of its products.

The largest bombs ever dropped upon human beings up till then had fallen in that country and had destroyed for some all faith in their fellows’ kindness and affection in a manner more traumatic and permanent than the after-effects of other violations. Had these nuclear events in their enormity produced a culture whose rewired psychology manifested a child’s need for comfort and found it in these choices of illusion over reality? However it had originated, the palliative went on to supplement and in some cases supplant the fellow human option with all of its insufficiencies.

“We need a place to stay.”

He spoke as though he were thinking out loud but he was, in fact, addressing her and Chloé gave a qualified response.

“There are no safe places.”

This seemed somewhat extreme. Overwrought.

“We can’t sleep in the park.”

“Yes, there is a curfew.”

No mention of how the dew might affect her. Nice if she were impervious and they could couch together in a secluded patch of water-logged grass where he would be shivering and she would be unable to warm him but surviving quite well as she waited for the morning sun.

Her neutral silence had an emptiness about it; the temperature lowered a significant degree. Had her thought patterns taken her to the same damp option? It was getting late. He tried again.

“What would be the least dangerous place?”

They couldn’t escape the credit trail they would leave behind them, and no one that he knew lived somewhere remote, unlikely, and hidden – deep in the woods, far in the desert, hermitic in the mountains.

“You would have to get cash. That is the only way to be safe. And hole up somewhere.”

Hole up! Her tongue must have curved with its pronunciation. Like cradling an oyster before it touched her palate. What bit of film or literature was she channeling? Or had she opened her synonym file? And then he remembered that she didn’t require her tongue in order to form speech.

“Yes. And where do we go from there?”

“We don’t. We hide. That’s safe.”

He was speaking as a child and she was being childish herself, unable to get off the topic of hide-outs without his help.

“What is less than safe…starting at the top of the scale?” He added this in order not to be deluged with options.

“If you stay at my place, it’s less than safe.”

Never mind the swiftness of the bizarre answer, he could barely grasp its implications. To all appearances Chloé herself hadn’t stopped pondering them.

“Your place?”

“Where I come from.”

A definition of sorts. Somehow their roles had become reversed and it was he having to solve problems.

She had come from Humphrey Martinfield, hadn’t she? Virgil knew his friend’s house. He had visited there.

“You mean Humphrey Martinfield’s place.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I am programmed to think of it as my place.”

“I see.”

He didn’t, but it was of no consequence. Still he persisted.

“And if I am your controller, what is my place to you?”

“It is yours.”

This time he did see, clearly, and it led to a moment of hollowness that he entered Alice-like.