THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (4 page)

“What more can I do for you? I am happy to service you again.”

She must have taken a quick charge in there. Her unspoilt summer dress cleared the plump dimpled knees, the combed hair shimmered, while amusement smeared her eyes and damp lips. Yes, she was ready again and he had a confessional impulse to take her with him and parade his vice.

“I’m all done in.”

A wan smile for the entity to record.

“Thank you, sir. It has been a pleasure.”

When the door closed behind him, Emily blinked twice, saving all of the data from this last encounter since the client had not asked for a deletion. Next, a shifting cloud released the full blaze of the afternoon sun drawing her to the window where her large dilated eyes concentrated the available energy of the photon flow. All the while she checked the orders that had come in. None were within a manageable distance, and so she went out into the street, ignoring her tarted up counterparts biological or otherwise. Her unhurried saunter brought her to the local park where she topped up her energies on a bench beneath a clear sky, her legs crossed and dress hiked above the knees. She favoured the men who passed by with a glance that slid over them and she placed one hand to the hair, the other to the leg.

In earlier times, the efforts of poets and philosophers foundered when the world’s attention had fundamentally turned elsewhere, and the youthful determination of Virgil and others to write well had come to a similar fate. Increasingly, with the refashioning of plastic brain patterns, the crafted word ran up against reader supply difficulties. It was not so much the shrinking of the Western mind as the rewiring of the human brain that had wordsmiths either suffering the fate of blacksmiths or enlisting themselves in the fast-read industry. Over time verbal prowess became, like the skills of so many past artisans, lost or, at best, providing for an online cottage industry. Commercial and political arenas remained for its humbled exploits where the limited scope of the performance stunted and straightjacketed its once glorious potential. One had only to compare the complex and profoundly nuanced compositions – in some cases dictated – of nineteenth and twentieth century novelists with the multiple drafts of manuscripts required in more digital times.

Brain patterns had shifted and fundamentally reordered themselves, and were no longer capable of imagining a world on the basis of the written word that continued to linger on as a tool for a dinosaur mentality – ironic considering its sophistication. It had devolved to become an adjunct – an object of sentiment at best and the continuing recipient of private endowments into perpetuity. Its patrons had staked their own claims to immortality upon the assumed permanence of what was most valued in their time. Through foundations they wagered much of their fortune upon this sure thing.

Fully realized digital hyper-worlds had arrived with their own heavens ready for human population. These imaginative spheres had once been, via the written page, the province of the wordsmith whose continued verbal dexterity was no match against materialized entities. The written word had striven gallantly for the span of a century with and against the stagings of the cinema – a medium that called for no effort beyond the capacity to breathe and absorb and pay the price for one’s backside. The onslaught of the given simply and brutally blasted much of the highly developed but nonetheless obsolete mentality out of existence. What survived did so in Jurassic literary parks. Why plod word by word through a barely discerned world, went the argument, when entire universes awaited for direct injection into one’s limitless and otherwise empty mind?

Virgil Woolf felt himself presentable in black turtleneck and fading black jeans, his thick salt-and-pepper hair strengthening a face that lacked flesh but not an intelligent cast; among its masculine charms, he held to be, the self-deprecating lips – their meaning subtle but accessible – and the direct guileless eyes with evidence of self-doubt and an undertow of hurt in their greens and hazels. His policy was not to hide anything about himself and it called for sustained attentiveness in order not to be an exhibitionist of any kind. He wanted his humanity in all its range to show. Barely under six feet tall, he carried little surplus weight; he walked a lot but, with little to his chest and shoulders, could benefit from a broader exercise spectrum.

He had left his grandmother’s building burdened with thoughts. Realizing he was in no state to say anything more to her, he had made his delayed exit, determinedly pushing open the triple-hinged front door onto a tidal wave of sunlight that buoyed his descent of the stubby staircase. He had wavered a moment on the snake-cracked sidewalk, dissatisfied at having allowed a synthetic flesh peddler to waylay him like that. It called for a rescue effort if his intention for the day were not to be completely ruined. His release of the seeds of life had left a hollowness that lingered on.

The episode had taken place mere steps away from his grandmother and scant shreds of time after his visit. No more than one or two intervening walls had blindfolded her, but can he truly have left her perimeters of consciousness? It shouldn’t have taken much psychic capacity to detect him. That thought sufficed to seal his present malaise.

What was she doing in that building, as good as abandoned? Never mind that synthesized sex provider. Its shabbiness had insinuated itself into and beneath his skin, with a generalized feeling of woe and loss. Impending loss. His grandmother to whom he dealt out calculated scoopfuls of time filled a place in him that would become void when ten thousand of the poet’s angels carried her from no longer responsive flesh – oh whimsical thought! That she found that place fitting, as she did, was much to bear what with him shrugging at the indulgence of that Emily thing as he made a rough calculation of his credit exposure.

The economy had simplified since the Big Crash. In a fateful moment of time, with all and sundry tumbling into the financial abyss, fat and skinny alike had agreed in contentious unison that, as a basis to land upon, everyone had what they materially had and no more, whereupon the falling sensation mercifully diminished and aggrieved constitutions proceeded to soldier on with a great deal less than the glory days but not the nothing that is an endless fall.

Virgil Woolf fancied himself a notch above the typical independent author – his latest literary effort was appearing in other languages – and bore himself with suitable if not unwavering confidence. His overall look of equanimity, as though he had achieved success in the world, he owed to an absence of worry when it came to the roof over his head and the food upon his plate. An annual endowment from an uncle who had died in the diplomatic service and bequeathed to him the interest of a trust fund gave him his freedom to mine very real and substantial sensibilities in matters worthy of reflection. When Virgil’s own physical retirement from life’s hedgerow finally came, it would in turn free the capital for the purchase of a modest portion of the Amazon rain forest – should any of its wilderness then remain available for protection – to ensure the continuance of a territorial bulwark for the indigenous parrots, boas and lemurs against the harvesting of timber for the manufacture of garden furniture.

His uncle’s testamentary wishes did, naturally enough, induce a reflective strain in Virgil’s conscience and, further, a sense of the import of his life. In the balance, his own comforts weighed upon one scale against the consequent perils to the natural world in the other. The removal of his indulgences and, eventually, his very life stood to improve, in no more than nano terms, the remedial prospects for the latter. It went without his saying that he appreciated to no end the value that his uncle had accorded him and, in addition, he recognized that his benefactor’s ultimate bequest contributed greatly to the ease with which he managed and bore the present burden of conscience.

His relaxed carriage owed as much, therefore, to his ability to pay his way in a carefree manner as to his seemingly endless series of unremunerative novels published on the World Wide Web. He also stoutly contributed postings of a sociological bent on the relationships of humans with their humanoids. These served his purposes as a kind of bait and switch whereby musings of no monetary value in themselves might lead his audience to consume his minimally priced fiction. The ironies of his domestic circumstance – a female humanoid softening the traumas of marital divorce – at times threatened to overshadow the merits of his literary productions.

More than controversy, more than the dissemination of opinion, Virgil and his fellow bloggers achieved semblances of consensus that coated an oily film over the social tide’s inexorable and completely independent passage. They identified a current that unstoppably manifested in any case, while giving every appearance that they were indispensable to the public’s grasp of what was happening one way or the other.

Virgil Woolf’s voice mattered, in the sense that it was one of those that the attentive ear heeded in an ocean of sound. Suitably, for his nervous disposition, he could invite guests of a similar mind to his home with little constraint but without being ostentatious. His material resources enabled him to entertain in restaurants and, in addition – what most gave him tone that nicely provided for choicer moments of sociability – he could disappear on jaunts and return with something interesting and out of the way to offer. Although meagre, the income from his independent publications benefited him by adding to the patina of self-worth he enjoyed and projected – it didn’t take much after all to live a little better and to give oneself a sense of personal fulfillment. His discourses upon robotic utopias and humanoid ascendancies might be found under such headings as
Urobia
and
Robotocracy
. He was grateful for his little ground floor flat with garden and tree that he owned.

What did closely preoccupy him that he had yet been unable to voice to his satisfaction concerned the reversals in status, whether they be in terms of gain or loss, that the introduction of female humanoids into the lives of males had engendered between the sexes – always keeping in mind the additional factor of rebalancing that the absolute fixing into law of equality had achieved. The historical dependency of masculine self-worth on the subjugation of women had naturally collapsed. Technological advances made it easier for men to look elsewhere for gratification. In consequence, men and women failed to develop new and responsive accommodations that would have avoided the distancing and the falling away from each other of their respective genders.

Men no longer had to risk themselves to obtain the favours of women and be subject to rejection or to moral inhibitions and matters of conscience.

The males of the species had shifted an old dependency onto a broader technological base and fully commodified it. Human simulacra obviated most needs of men for female companionship, with the same holding true albeit in lesser numbers for their gender opposites. The growing indifference of men, for the most part already primed from their online resort to profoundly available and specialized pornography versus the hazards of real human contact, established the market.

Ensconced under his floppy hat, seated at a table of one of his many favourite cafés – depending upon the direction he happened to walk – Virgil dismissed what exactly their sense of his presence might be in those entities and their owners around him. This particular establishment overlooked a less visited portion of Central Park. After dwelling for a moment upon a jogger before she disappeared among the trees, he returned to the subject of his hat and the idea that this accessory afforded him a healthy dose of distinction. A careful appraisal of the other customers showed them to be no less conscientious, although more conservative, in their appearance. A uniform understatement made for the difference between them and himself. Virgil always felt that a signature piece was aesthetically de rigueur and he entertained some pity at its neglect in his fellows, making for a forlorn category of “cool” and an inescapable conformity.

In the end, he liked the look, that was all.

Beyond the café’s awning, in whose gloom some darkened persons sat, a tree’s foliage brushed chiaroscuros onto thinly trafficked, broad asphalt. When a car or a bus passed, these vehicles intruded no more than visually upon the outer silence. He blinked once or twice for them not to overfill his eye and they were gone. Intermittently, other traffic replaced them. Across the street, the penultimate evening light flaunted colours that could only fade to greys. In this painterly moment, the less recessive leaves and the swathes of uncut grass struck him with the strength of colour cards under a photographer’s lamp. A recent tendency to wildness in park management brought his deceased uncle’s legacy to mind.

He would have liked to have someone there with him. Even Molly would do, but she was an older model and he preferred to keep her indoors away from invidious glances.

Some customers whispered in a restrained manner with their humanoids; a slight befuddlement in one interaction was undoubtedly due to the nature of the discourse and the unexpected arenas opened up. Each grouping of human and humanoid suggested an island of intimacy that was decidedly private and out of bounds.

He took out his Mont Blanc fountain pen – both distinction and affectation – and contentedly wielded it. This writing instrument was one of his few luxuries. Now he sighed. He was in the uncomfortable position of critiquing society when he was a raisin in the pudding just like all the other raisins. Worse, he was reconciled to his own place in the pudding, while he recognized the societal concoction for what it was. Too sweet, too rich – not even he could extricate himself from its finely cooked dough, no matter if he left Molly at home: witness his recent dalliance. What was the point of being a Cassandra when there was no going back or forward, up or down? He keyed his Mont Blanc to save text.