THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (8 page)

“What was the phone call about? Why the hologram?”

The junior partner’s darker orbs seemed unsure on their uneasy bed of aluminum so that Virgil skated back to the elder’s piercing bore. Beyond intensity, it yielded nothing of the man himself, but he succumbed and provided answers of a general sort.

“I can’t say. It’s not unusual for Humphrey to call like that and invite himself over, if he has something on his mind to chat about, that is. We talk, usually not anything deadly serious. People in Humphrey’s position rarely lay their problems on their friends – they are able to solve what comes along themselves.

“How shall I put it?” – He decided not to struggle for mutual comfort over his diction. – “Humphrey’s a gregarious individual who feels he has social privileges that others might not presume themselves to have. I’ve never felt the need to disabuse him because he had a way – he gave freely of himself to those he trusted, and one makes allowances.”

Virgil reined himself in, and traded self-conscious but otherwise blank stares with the detectives. A wash of dislike had passed through them at his elitist choice of vocabulary. They harboured no sympathy for his inability, still less his refusal to find the means to express himself in a simple and straightforward, democratic manner. These attitudes always seemed to work one way, in his view, toward the lowest common denominator. Whatever the elder one’s contempt, he had to give it to him that he had understood the gist of the statement and hadn’t flinched unlike his junior partner who had found his strategic location in Virgil’s peripheral vision.

The detectives made to rise.

“You can expect media at your door.”

“Yes, I imagine you are right. I was just on my way to see him.”

“Take this.” A card with the city’s police insignia and Woolsey – the detective’s name – and phone number.

They considered and then offered him a lift.

Not a criminal but still a tightly inserted human package, he sat in the back on the plastic covered bench seat that stopped a foot from the imprisoning screen. Had it always been this way or was this a refinement on the past?

“This is it.”

There had been no conversation as they rolled through the streets. The two detectives had muttered to each other now and then. The car’s javel-smeared sniff behind him, media vehicles advertised their presence when he stepped out.

Halfway up the hospital steps and with a sense that his police transport had gone, he decided not to risk it. No, he would turn back and wait. Humphrey did not need him, not to stir things up. Most of all he was unwilling for the hordes who were already facing his way to label him as a source of information. Humphrey would tell the police what he knew if he was capable, and he and Virgil could talk once the story had settled down.

He wandered for a few city blocks and then sidled into a coffee shop where he ordered a latte that he took to a table by the giant plate glass window, and began to check what was online.

Humphrey Martinfield’s products with the familiar forbidden fruit logo were everywhere. The slim and elegant humanoids accompanied the coffee shop’s clientele in a discreetly companionable manner but with a flourish to their design that set them apart from their less-inspired, drawing board cousins. These were stylish, irresistible and very expensive creations of an artist’s mind, not products of an engineer’s spec sheet. Lineups continued to form for the latest models as they always had. The company had begun to lose its famous sense of purpose until Humphrey came along with designs that rendered human companionship with humanoids socially acceptable and desirable, and finally indispensable. Society, it was generally agreed, would be poorer and less advanced without it. Naturally enough, emotional attachments established themselves, as has always been the case, between man and his possessions although these were necessarily one-sided, healthy attachments in the main since humanoids like anything else are disposable.

Yes, here it was.

The unrolled screen had snapped into place with its designated accompanying snippet of a Mahler symphony, and already unleashed a stream of Humphrey Martinfield-related items upon his lip-read request.

Rumours that the next generation would respond directly to thought were unbounded and mental energy that should focus on the task at hand would instead deplete itself on the medium, but if the money boys can go there, they will. Ironically, man will continue to fashion freedom out of technological enslavement. ‘Partnership’, some call it. How long had it been since personal need and not the manufactured tastes of the shopping public had regulated one’s life?

Humphrey was dead. A pin entered under Virgil’s fingernail, and then numbness subdued the pain. Various dissipating considerations swarmed in its place. He would prefer his own imminent passing not to be the occasion for visits. Besides, his presence at the hospital would have been superfluous to the mortal event and unnecessarily caught up in it – how many scant moments ago? So strongly did he feel that he formulated an image of himself being there. The police interrogation had served to increase his involvement. It had made for a different less bearable linkage. Humphrey might have avoided his fate had his attention not been on him Virgil, now innocently implicated.

Silence pervaded the coffee house. He was a part of it, one of its units, none of them particularly calm although a form of paralysis had taken hold in the air itself. Its occupants had become a single-minded aggregate absorbing the same news, generating similar emotions that looked for their passage out to other prospective mourners.

He read on.

A hologram materializing – Humphrey’s next ‘big thing’ according to the rumour mills – subsumed all talk of the accident and the injuries sustained. Eager voices named and denounced their suspects: human supremacists, the military-industrial complex that had a planet and a life of its own. He closed the screen – it formed a pita bread roll around the steamy animus.

_________

When all is gone, what stays is a dense filigree of papery tissue – an abandoned cocoon.

How he hated these occasions! Dutiful Molly could give him funeral details but no sympathy. However much he wanted to stay in his flat, his ownership of it appeared to be provisional and attendant upon his own Molly-like function now that an invisible force had summoned him to make an appearance at the event. He would respond as would she to one of his commands. Not that he didn’t believe. His faith came with a shudder, so imbued was he with matters that had nothing to do with faith. The door to the garden was open and he gazed there for the air had seemed to shift. His eye ran over the tree trunk, and the leafy clusters of the lower branches that hung in view beneath the lintel of the paned French doors. What had a shift in the air to do with social convention? Without an answer, he would proceed according to the protocol.

“Is that all, Virgil, before I shut down?”

He was usually a creature of habit. Did she sense something different as she fulfilled every last duty?

“No, go ahead.”

He watched her violet eyes close.

Virgil’s cab left him a block away from the cathedral where a police officer stood in front of his motorcycle across the intersection and signalled for the traffic to take the left or the right. Nodding to this sun-glassed, uniformed being, he proceeded carefully past the considered arbitrations and joined the curious and the mournful who spilled onto the street from the sidewalk and, in an opposite manner, climbed in serried ranks up the steps to the door’s dark opening.

Trees arched overhead and partially veiled the neighbouring brownstones with botanical benedictions. Given time and municipal indulgence, these steeples might enjoy the same. A pair of squirrels disputed each other’s pursuits across rents in the shade. In the end some deus ex machina intervened and they decided to leave well enough alone. Virgil kept his attention longer than it was normal on these two creatures, raising and lowering his eyes until he reached the cathedral entrance. He wished to be neither accosted by nor drawn to accost anyone in the crowd of mourners.

Two dark-suited individuals – burly, close-cropped, thick-necked, small-eared – were glancing at the proffered, black-edged invitations. A patina of meat-fed forbearance signalled Virgil in. A second line of invitees filed past the twin security person.

Virgil was already inside when he heard his name called and judged himself beyond the necessary range to look around. A vast ornate womb whose occupants were ranked in military style rows, showing their backs, enclosed him. A golden stand of God’s windpipes faced them. The nervous mourners fiddled and fidgeted and endured relentless destruction and recreation of their personal cosmos. No apologies sounded or were expected although perhaps a full-throttle bellow from the organ would make amends.

Virgil could hardly wait for the massive instrument to carry all with it and get on with life as procedure. He had spied an open spot next to the aisle where he placed himself.

Who had called out to him?

Now that he felt safely ensconced, he twisted his head about creating no disturbance beyond himself in the ranks of the pew-rooted hedges.

Death had marked each person for its later convenience. They were in denial of course, a whispering, throat-clearing sort of denial, pathetic if not for a communal transcendence that was holy in its own right. The gently gripped pew wood itself shared in it. Virgil saw no particular signal that might enlighten him. Faces glanced his way with a smack that told him to look no more than once.

They had all remained standing, himself included. Why? Did early arrivals look to assert themselves before all this grandeur? Had they submitted to their relative insignificance as in more humble circumstances, the rest of the attendees would have followed suit. Now it was too late. He found it impossible and shameful not to remain on his feet until the priest himself issued from some much scanned, much dismissed spot in the wings. The cleric mercifully ended the question with a downward movement of the hands, effectively lowering the lot of them, some parts more readily than others. The frocked man was restrained patience itself, waiting an extra bit before he spoke.

Virgil couldn’t decipher the priest’s expression: the fish shadow at the fat jocular lips looked ready to feed – a spotlight on the ecclesiastic might have erased the disturbance. As it was, dark waters filled this Catholic vessel and overflowed.

Again, the hands commanded, lifting upward and pausing in midair, as though he would not trust the congregants’ show of silence and intended to forestall an eruption of sound, or preemptively move against something long experienced. Throats did clear and feet shuffled as they sought a more satisfactory purchase of shoe on the hard stone floor. Whatever his motives, the assemblage was gathered for one purpose and, although unused to having a shepherd, interpreted the gesture as benign and expectantly awaited further developments from the sanctified one.

In reassuring fashion, the tone of his voice took advantage of the surrounding acoustics and he began by anchoring all and sundry in the obvious.

“We are here today…”

The hands lowered and tightly gripped the edges of the pulpit that it not defy the gravity of his opening words. Virgil stared at the white surplice and gold scarf-like collar or ‘stole’ – the rather fashionista word for it.

“…to commemorate and to mourn…”

Here the wide plump brows knitted together in a spasm.

“…and also,” the larynx hastened to add before the great fish of his intention slipped away from him and he would have had to dive after it, “…to raise up for judgment at last, as we all shall be, a son of the Church whose garden has been the world.”

Grace is sine qua non in this sanctified world and the priest’s text-based declamation provided an adequate similitude of it.

There it was…as he had not trusted silence to endure neither did he trust Deity properly to take in hand Humphrey Martinfield without a reminder from His servant in the pulpit.

“How many of us can claim the same worldly blessings to such an extent?”

A butterfly’s wing fluttered winsomely as its damp thought tested the local air. Having included himself in this fallen world, the priest could be humble in his apology for a sheep gone astray: we are one body and one mind, are we not, and only seeming to be fragile and separate?

What form of humanoid was charging itself in this cleric’s chambers? Virgil speculated upon the likelihood of an underage model shipped into the country from Thailand, legal but morally tainted, that region’s response to the harvesting of its young. When it comes to humanoids, anything goes, pretty well summed up the courts’ position. As stated, “Products of fantasy are protected under the conventions for freedom of expression,” the principle stipulation being just so long as no likeness may be established to persons outside the public eye. In the end, anime characters with tight and pliant rumps proved among the most popular items as these allowed for a more disposable moral attitude. Humphrey’s humanoid flock had long surpassed in numbers even the Pope’s congregants.

Did a spirit of envy haunt the priest’s voice?

He had pumped it full with all the original sin of that first snake-bitten duo in the Garden he could with a wink insert. Where lay their salvation? Did it come to them retroactively? Virgil reminded himself to ask Molly what she had on the redemption of Adam and Eve. Giant moths had eaten into his homespun religious education. Among his fellows ranged about him, presenting a steadfast and attentive appearance, he couldn’t be alone in his ignorance of theology. He suspected that all of them sat in a void on benches made up of empty space.