Bad luck, real bad shit. One of Deckard’s old partners in the blade runner unit, the coldest of the bunch, had to go back there and pull the plug on the guy, who by that point was completely nuts and seeing escaped replicants everywhere. Extremely terminated; the loose-cannon blade runner’s body was flown back to Los Angeles and buried with honors, without details. The lid was clamped down in St. Paul, with judicious application of the slush fund that Bryant administered out of the bottom drawer of his desk. Silence on the matter . . . at least until this Isidore character opened his mouth.
“How do you know about St. Paul?”
A smug expression settled on Isidore’s face. “Mr. Deckard, it’s my business to know about things like that. It’s the buh-business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. The real business.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
Isidore glanced at the pictures tacked to the wall. “I didn’t even ruh-really know, until old Mr. suh-Sloat died. I’d just worked for him before that, duh-doing what he told me to do, fixing up those busted animals—the fake ones, as yuh-you’d kuh-call them. But then when he was gone, and he’d left me everything . . .” He brought his gaze back around to Deckard.
“When he left me . . . the great task. The responsibility. What he had done, and what I had to do. That was when I found out the truth.” Behind the round lenses, his eyes looked both wise and pitying. “You’re a failure, Deckard. You were a failure before you quit being a blade runner. The whole blade runner shtick is a failure. You’re suh-supposed to be keeping escaped replicants from running around on Earth, being ‘dangerous,’ as you like to think they are. Well, you buh-buh-blew it. You and all the rest of the blade runners. You didn’t accomplish jack about tracking down replicants. And you know why? Because you can’t do anything about it. You never could. Blade runners—shuh-shuh-sheesh. Buncha frauds, wasting taxpayers’ muh-money. The LAPD should’ve pensioned you off, or put you back in uniform, made tuh-ruh-rub-traffic cops outta you. Something useful, at least. Because something like the St. Paul incident—and there’ve been others, ones you don’t even know about—you know wuh-what something like that shows?”
He slouched down in the chair, hating the guy. “You’re gonna tell me.”
“That’s why you’re huh-here, Deckard. It’s not just that there can be false positives on the Voigt-Kampff test. That blade runners have been icing humans—ruh-real humans—that flunked the test for one reason or another. It’s also that wuh-once you admit that fallibility of the empathy-testing methodology, you admit the possibility of false negatives. Replicants who pass the test, who walk right by you because your big deal Voigt-Kampff machines tuh-tuh-told you they were human.”
“A possibility.” A shrug. “Big deal. Anything’s possible. Doesn’t mean it ever happened.”
“Buh—but you see . . .” Isidore folded his hands together in his lap. “I can prove it’s happened. That replicants can get past the empathy tests, your fancy-shuh-shmancy Voigt-Kampff machines. Even before the Nexus-6 models came on-line, they were getting puh-past. For years now—muh-maybe decades—there’ve been escaped replicants walking around on Earth. Right here in L.A., even. And there’s nothing that you or any of the other blade runners can do about it. Because you can’t find them.”
“Metaphysics.” He glared back at the other man. “Bullshit. You’re talking religion. Articles of faith. Postulating an invisible entity—it exists but you can’t see it. Nobody can. Replicants passing as human—they exist because you think they have to exist. Good luck proving that one.”
“Nuh-nuh-not faith, Deckard. But reality. I’ve seen them, talked to them, wuh-watched them come and go . . .” Isidore’s gaze shifted away, refocusing on the radiance of an inner vision. “Oh, much more than that. I know everything about them. Isn’t that fuh-fuh-funny?” An expression of amazement. “I’m the person who couldn’t ever see the difference, between human and not, between the fuh-fake and the real—you could see those things, but I couldn’t. I was blind to them. And I won. The way I see things . . . it became real. From in here . . .” He tapped the side of his head again. “To everywhere.” The fingertip moved away from the skull.
“I made it real.”
He stayed silent, watching. A few minutes before he’d been sure that the other man was insane. Now he wasn’t sure. Of anything.
The gaze of the enlightened, of those who know the truth, turned upon him once more.
“Don’t you see, Deckard?” The voice soft and gentle, stammer evaporated. “That’s what the business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital was all along—or at least that’s what it had become before old Mr. Sloat left it to me. His legacy. When I found out what he’d been doing—what we’d all been doing—I didn’t have any choice. I had to go on with it.”
He peered closer at the man. “With what?”
“Turning fakes—what you’d call fakes—into the real. That’s what we’d started out doing, with the animals—building and repairing them so they couldn’t be distinguished from the ones that’d been born that way. Doing it with animals is legal; Hannibal Sloat just took it the next logical step. The necessary step. The Van Nuys Pet Hospital is the last station on the underground railway for escaped replicants: when they get out of the off-world colonies and reach Earth, they come straight here. Right under the noses of the blade runners and all the rest of the LAPD; who’d ever think of raiding a pet hospital? Hm? And then when the escaped replicants get here . . . I fix them. And when I get done fixing them . . . they can pass an empathy test. I tweak their involuntary reaction times, their blush responses, their pupil fluctuations, so they can sail right past a Voigt-Kampff machine. And they do pass; they always pass.” Isidore nodded slowly, as if he’d just thought of something. “So given that there’ve been some real humans who’ve flunked the empathy tests . . . I guess that makes my fixed-up replicants realer than real, huh?”
“If they exist at all.” The other man’s words had stung him, needled him back into a way of thinking, a way of being that he’d thought he’d given up completely. “If they existed . . . we would’ve caught them eventually. At least some of them.” Deckard could hear an old brutality setting steel in his voice. “And it’s got nothing to do with being a blade runner. It’s about being a cop. And what cops know. You’re talking conspiracy, buddy. Anytime you got that many in on something, some of them are gonna crack. They’re not as strong as the others, they’re not as good at hiding, at sweating it out when they know they’re being hunted. All it takes is one, and then the whole game’s up. And that’s how we would’ve caught your fixed-up replicants. If they existed.”
“True . . .” Isidore nodded slowly. “As you say, not everybody has the nerves for hiding. For staying hidden. You and the rest of the blade runners must be proud of having made yourselves into such objects of fear. Tuh-terrorists, really. But this is something that old Mr. Sloat knew all about. And knew what to do about it, too. And I’ve done the same as he did. There’s more than just the blush response that can be fixed on an escaped replicant. There’s the memory; that can be fixed as well.”