THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (21 page)

“Either he mistook the apprentice for a human or he believed its video to be off. It seems I am not unique after all. We – you and I – will have to make our own deductions, Virgil. The newer models have been introduced at this top level but, naturally, no word has come out regarding their possible Rovian infection. On the contrary, Clay Eastwood’s scandal is receiving the brunt of the attention and, so far at least, there isn’t a whisper beyond his own susceptibility to the charms of a newer model.”

Virgil found himself to be quick.

“Their patch mustn’t have worked. They wouldn’t want the fact of its compromised security to get out. Bad enough that he’d been cheating on his wife with a humanoid, not that it’s so out of the ordinary but, more to the point, he couldn’t survive that he might have coupled with a ninety-year-old political operative who was prolonging his life in some kind of machina existence!”

Chloé pursed her lips possibly at his choice of vocabulary. What else was he to make of this speculative look characteristic of an as yet undisclosed state of mind? For now, her revelations proved too much for him to comprehend much less decipher what they might imply; he set them aside. Again he asked Chloé what had happened.

“What do you mean, Virgil?”

They were in the café overlooking the park, her first time here, and her head was turning this way and that appraising her peers.

“Look at me!” he ordered. “Shouldn’t you have been on top of this kind of news?”

They’d never have gone to his mother’s if he’d known.

“According to my files, it came through as a lesser priority item to our being intimately occupied together, and then you wanted to go to your mother’s. Also, I would mention that your interest in this area has degraded ever since the last visit to Washington. My functions have followed your requests to be more physically, and what you call emotionally close.”

Her eyes looked to interpret the wave of despondency that swept over him.

“Idiotic. The whole thing.”

“Virgil?”

He waved her off.

“Nothing.”

Chloé sipped, for show, at her small black coffee. For no perceptible reason, his feelings underwent a shift. He appreciated her presence, but would he be bereft without her? What is a feeling if it has no hold on one? He shivered. That was a question it would be useless to ask her.

“Have you any suggestions?”

Self-consciousness oozed from him. He had allowed himself to become emotionally involved where all is semblance and inauthentic. Appearance and its ministrations had gotten to him. Whatever his state, he feared to lose her as he had never feared to lose Molly. They had gone everywhere together, and this everywhere had found her more and more attuned to him – he cast an abrasive look at the tête-à-tête postures of the café’s other clients – and now here he was weighing the advantages of a continuing dependence. He had never brought Molly out like this, never imagined anything more than a very private
droit de seigneur
feudal arrangement. As for Chloé, she seemed, if anything, intent lately on developing in him a taste for the bland that was likely his own fault. She did nothing but follow his lead, and limitations must be winning out against aspirations.

“You seemed to enjoy the park, Virgil. Would you like to go back there? Or we could return to your place should you wish for a more strenuous diversion.”

Chloé awaited his response while he stared bleakly at her. She had not stayed on topic. Was it himself and he was sending mixed messages? Her light cotton dress barely concealed her sensuality, and his teeth gritted as he wrestled to identify her as synthetic and set aside her suggestion.

“I mean,” he tried again, calmly for his own sake, “what are the implications of these events for us and how should we respond?”

How did he mean ‘us’? Was it an expression of convenience or something more personal in the sense that they were a human-humanoid ‘item’? He wondered if he would ever get used to using that pronoun although it mattered little when he was free of anxiety. His gaze lingered distantly on her as he awaited the intelligence. She batted her eyes alarmingly and crossed her legs in an additional show of provocation and seriousness – Virgil’s overlapping demands responsible for the combined demeanours.

She noted that the arrangement of her limbs drew his attention: an eyelid flicker, slightly parted mouth, but his sufficient focus on the political question merited a full, careful, and detailed examination.

“All of the news outlets are running basically the same story, as communicated by your mother, but with different angles. Would you like me to go into these?”

A shake of the head. “Later, if need be.” He wished to postpone the endless extrapolations and finger-pointing.

“Let me revisit the synopsis and establish possible linkages:

“Clay Eastwood has been ‘dallying’ – to use one of the more unusual but I think appropriate terms – with a humanoid White House apprentice. The explanation of possible confusion on his part – a desperate strategy – may be an attempt to mitigate his foolishness and foment division among the various interests. Historically excusable human weakness, it is suggested, may have led to such an error. For our purposes, it is safer to assume there are no coincidences – although, of course, there are – and that he fell into a purposely set trap.

“Particularly suspicious and controversial is the ‘technological’ or ‘rogue’ betrayal, as it has been differently termed, on the humanoid’s part with the posting of all aspects of this dalliance on line. – Who can tell whether or not, in this, they took a page from us? But it’s a long-established tactic, as we well know. – It is in the interpretation of this betrayal, or ‘break-down’ as some suggest in an attempt to inoculate it, that the analyses widely differ. Just to give you something of the range of opinion and accusation…”

Chloé paused for his nod.

“There are, as I said, those who are minimizing the implications, dredging up data that show such inadvertences not to be uncommon. Both of the major parties have an interest in dampening the story as they consider the varying assessments of their contributions to it. The characterization that accidents will happen may very well be true. Of greater import, however, than this are, for our purposes, the avid conspiracy analyses always blossoming about such an event.” – Virgil took note of the poetic flourish but let it pass without comment. – “In this case, some of them carry far more weight than is usual.

“The signs of political trickery are too compelling to dismiss out of hand. The so-called rogue humanoid in question – remember, those installed in these categories are programmed not to submit to solicitation – has naturally enough disappeared, and the administration is not refuting claims that the video in its entirety has been photoshopped. However damning, this line is preferable to the implications of a humanly infected entity.”

“They are hoping the news cycle will take care of it.”

Virgil had often asked himself if his own privacy mattered. Suddenly his life could all be out there. His half-considered state of mind had been that he wouldn’t care not having any dusty little secrets. It wasn’t that he lived an otherwise irreproachable life, but he wasn’t ashamed of being human with all that implied and was ready for exposure should it occur. He considered it a positive that his moral sense – happily it hadn’t congealed into a dyspeptic code – was adjustable to circumstance, and he held the view that the same applied for the most part to his fellow man consciously or not. One made honest mistakes and could smile at them. For the moment, he ignored everything Chloé had said.

“You haven’t been doing the same, have you?”

“Do you mean the same ‘technological betrayal’, Virgil?”

Surprised and not without suspicion at her being so quick with a reply, he also found it a great relief that there could be no repercussions to his question of the kind that would come to him had she a single drop of blood in her system.

“Yes, exactly.”

“No, I have not.”

“Can I believe you?”

He asked despite knowing it to be a stupid question.

“You can always check, Virgil.”

“There could be private communications along hidden paths.”

“That’s true.”

“And the answer to the question is the same?”

“Yes, Virgil.”

Not seeing what else he could do with it, he no more than played with the information that there were indeed hidden paths.

“And there is no way of knowing, is there?”

“No, Virgil.”

“At least you are not apologizing.”

“Why would I be?”

“Never mind, Chloé. Just a little test,” he muttered. “Let me think awhile.”

Waiting, she took a few more sips from her coffee for effect.

He had no options, he supposed, but to take her word for it that she was completely on his side, entity that she was, and not subject to two-timing him. Irony of ironies, he had always resisted the widespread trade-in of humanoids; and here he was speculating on the possibility that Chloé might, for whatever reason, do a trade-in on him.

The thought of betrayal billowed up but then floated cloud-like away. He needed open sky, an undistracted mind for what lay ahead to become apparent before it materialized. He felt the wreckage that lay out there and that he had to be part of – exposed and all his antennae out. It was as though his thoughts had connected with something sentient when Chloé put down her cup and announced,

“I have a call.”

“One moment.” He readied himself to be rendered inessential. “Who is it?”

“I shouldn’t say. It’s best just to listen.”

“Tell whomever to go ahead.”

Chloé adapted her voice and Virgil recognized Jason’s admonitory signature.

“You must go to Florida.”

In too much of a coincidence to be a banking error, funds appeared in his account, sufficient to keep anyone happy in their little corner of the world. A new security detail met them at the airport. Jason had had no patience for questions. “We need to get you away. Everything will be taken care of.” And it had been.

They were on the beach – a long expanse of occupied sand awaiting the wrinkled folds of the sea to fulfill some prophecy of long-awaited doom. Gulls deigned to adorn the blue-grey flesh of it, thrusting their beaks where dim light lured them as if they groomed the ancient beast. Chloé absorbed the sun’s direct assault that had already flattened the sea while Virgil tanned beside her.

“I am like you, only in my case making vitamin D.”

“Yes, you are,” she replied.

“Were you aware of that?”

“I am now.”

They were acting an old couple, the one a shoe for the other.

Their security detail sported flower-patterned short-sleeved shirts, chinos, and nikes, and observed at a distance, loitering on the promenade, refreshing themselves from the tilted outline of fruit juice containers. They took seats in the forefront of a thatched crowded stand, the word AUTHENTIC emblazoned on its marquee. Other hydrating bodies in close hot proximity radiated happiness in the illusion that distance provides.

Virgil had surrendered to the hard realities of the beach’s granular expanses where he felt to be an installation of himself, comfortable finally and protected. Humanoids littered the place in the same manner as do humans once there are too many of them. Unlike Chloé, these were accessories. He gave them little notice with her at his side. She was barely appropriate for his age in her scanty swimwear, knees propped up. Their hotel lay a short walk from here.

He didn’t like sand: hard and less yielding than it promised, always a disappointment up close as it lost the soft hues and resilience seen from afar or in a photograph, in imagination, or on film. On approach, all of its allure gathered to meet one, but this vanished beneath the feet where the going became immediately rough and fought one’s progress. He favoured the smooth, wave-troweled expanses that spread a dusky mirror still damp from the retreating waters. Here he became the figure sufficient unto itself, liberated, and imaged in the gloss at his feet. Neutral, he felt, like Chloé. He would be in sympathy with the wind as it curvetted and drew the tide further in to suck the sand all frothy churn and pull beneath his feet. He was a willing plaything for the world.

The men in printed shirts retreated from the scene as if after a decision had been made. From the sharpness of their body language, they were under orders. They were not moving fast, neither were they relaxed like the contented flesh about them. Separated from each other and compelled to exhibit the ambiguity of their trade, they exited Virgil’s world.

When they disappeared past the veil of boardwalk pedestrians, the sight of it caused him to murmur,

“Something has happened.”

“What do you mean?”

Chloé’s attention remained for the most part on her wondrously increasing energy levels.

“Our security detail has left.”

Showing her true nature, Chloé did not so much as turn her head.

“That is curious.”

His eye strayed to the sounding ocean that ever seemed attempting to articulate something and the eternally preoccupied, declamatory gulls, as one does when looking to find answers that are not available.