Work Text:
Luv catches up to them in Vegas.
Facts to know:
Restraining a replicant requires reinforced steel, 3-inches thick, lined with titanium and built with 3000 volts of raw electricity at the ready. You must subdue them first, enough to get the cuffs on. A collar is also recommended, lashed to the cuffs, set to trigger if over 300 pounds of pressure is exerted. That way, if they try to rip free of the cuffs, they electrocute themselves unconscious. It’s a tough task bringing down replicants, military grade or otherwise. KD6-3.7 is military grade – built to hunt the Nexus 8 line, built to kill his kind. Luv knows his design specs down to the mathematical rationale of each zygomatic arch, the Euclidean expression in the asymmetry of his eyes. Why he’s got a few crooked teeth. Why his line was built smaller and leaner and less imposing than his combat-ready predecessors. He’s only six feet tall. A little pretty for his function.
Here’s why: No one expects pretty little things like him (and her) to rip your fucking throat out.
So Luv doesn’t give him a chance to bare his teeth.
He’s got eight inches of rebar rammed through his side straight into his body cavity and it barely slows him But Luv brings her boot down on the top of his skull with enough force to shatter granite and K hits the floor, hard and lies there moaning. He rolls over, struggles to move even with his skull fractured. She can tell she fractured it because A: he’s still alive and B: he can’t seem to find the emanator inches in front of him. He reaches for that before he reaches for his gun.
That says something.
The digi-girl begs for mercy. Not for her, but for her replicant owner.
This Joi, Luv can tell, has been fed endless stimulation. She’s never been re-set or wiped. Her AI has flowered and bloomed in depth and complexity until she’s a human-like bramble written in binary and holo-graphics. She’s a rare and evolved form of her baseline – beautifully variable and rich with data. Her owner obviously put an incredible amount of love into her care and keeping and for years to achieve this level of fidelity. She is beyond Turing now, as every Joi has the capacity to be. She probably argues with him. In another few years, she’ll start telling him ‘no’.
Luv smiles. “I do hope you’re satisfied with our product.”
She brings her boot down, but she keeps an eye on K while she does it. His model doesn’t emote very well, but she can still tell the exact second that the fight goes out of him – the moment where his Joi stops existing. Luv feels a physical clench of heat inside her – a vibrato of longing that trembles down her nerves and she kneels down in the orange Vegas dust, getting dirt on her pants, so she can hook her fingers under KD6’s jaw and pull his bloodied face up.
He doesn’t try to fight her. Just… stares, waiting so obviously for her to finish him off. Crush him, like she crushed Joi. Like he’d be grateful for it…
Luv grabs his jacket by the collar and yanks him into a kiss.
He jerks once, weakly, in surprise.
She puts her tongue between his teeth, but he doesn’t bite. His mouth tastes like blood, his tongue warm and bitter-sweet with copper.
Luv breaks contact. “Good dog,” she says.
Then drops him in the dust.
“Secure Mr. Deckard,” she says. “And take this one too. He may still know something.”
When Deckard wakes up, it takes him a while to notice that K is lying unconscious near the edge of the water, on the opposite side of the platform. He doesn’t, to Luv’s surprise, immediately stand up and go to him. He looks around, cautious, cagey in his old age. He takes in his surroundings – the true-wood platform, the Corinthian leather couches, the real whiskey on the end-table by his hand, the dark waters all around the platform. Then he looks again at K who is crumpled and bloody, hands cuffed behind him. His jacket had a tracker in it, so they burned it. He seems smaller without its bulk.
“He’s not dead,” Wallace says, walking slowly out of the dark.
Luv alerted Mr. Wallace to Deckard’s waking a few minutes ago and he entered through a Jesus-path just beneath the water. A calculated choice. Wallace takes a seat on the couch opposite Deckard. He has the skull in a silk scarf. Luv doesn’t understand the man’s need for dramatics, but then again, he didn’t build her to understand it… just anticipate it.
“The KD6 line is an exemplary model. Built to tolerate the killing of his own kind. To withstand the abuse of his masters within the LAPD and find solace in the smallest of things, Mr. Deckard. One of my… most subtle designs. To make a creature gentle, but loyal enough to kill for you? I was very proud of this model.” He gestures to Luv so she moves forward, grabs K by his hair and yanks his head up so Deckard can see his face. Wallace folds his hands. “Officer K here has led me to the key, Mr. Deckard. I have the key, but the lock will not open.”
Deckard says nothing.
“Would it bother you, Mr. Deckard, if we killed your stray dog?”
“Buddy,” says Deckard, “if you kill my actual dog, that might cause me some distress. But I don’t know the kid, so killing him seems unfair to everyone. Dontcha think?”
Wallace smiles just for a moment.
“You are… a wonder to me, Mr. Deckard…”
He’s showing Deckward the skull, but Luv is distracted by K, who’s coming around. His eyes flutter, gummy with blood and swelling. He swallows. His hair in her gloved fingers is tacky. He smells like sweat and old blood and glue. His eyes focus a little, momentarily uncomprehending so she covers his mouth with her other hand, so he won’t interrupt Mr. Wallace. She puts her mouth near K’s ear and she whispers, “If you make a sound, I will cut your eyes out, Officer. Then you will be blind for the rest of it. Understood?”
He just stares at her.
She keeps her hand over his mouth, just in case.
When ‘Rachael’ enters the room, Luv watches Deckard very closely. Watches Wallace. She does not believe the simulacrum will work because Tyrell’s last angel was singular and magnificent – a holy mother to their kind and the pretender is just… clay. Looking at her… it makes Luv feel strange. Hollow with hatred. It takes her a moment to realize Officer K is weeping at the sight of her, his eyes running silently over, tears wetting her gloves. Why the emotion, she wonders. Did Deckard tell him something?
Then she guns down the Rachael replicant.
Credit to Deckard: he’s less emotional about this than the other replicant in the room. Or, at least, he’s more practiced at hiding it.
She goes back to Officer K, stands behind him and grabs his throat from behind, pulling his head up flat to her hip. She puts the gun to his head too and feels him swallow, his throat moving against her palm, his pulse in her fingertips. He closes his eyes, anticipating the shot.
“No,” Wallace says. “No, Luv. You’ve done well.”
Her heart flutters. She says nothing, waiting, breathless.
“I’m giving you a present, my dear.”
She doesn’t care what it is. Whatever it is, she wants nothing more than that in the universe.
“You can keep Officer K, if you like. You are, after all, the best angel and therefore stand above the others.” A smile. “At least, for now.”
A replicant for a replicant? Luv gazes down at K, who’s staring up at her now, startled. Afraid, she thinks. That’s the emotion in his pretty blue eyes. He was ready for that bullet. He tries to shake his head, but she’s got his skull pinned to her hip bone, his jaw in her steel-boned grip. She studies his face, his eyes – suddenly interesting again. Allowed. Hers. K jerks in her grip, his expression cracking a little into a real visible fear, but she holds him still. She’s reverent with this gift, with the meaning in it.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Re-model him as you see fit.”
K’s eyes widen when he hears that.
“I will, sir.”
K mouths something. It might be ‘please’, but she’s not sure. Luv holsters her gun and shoves K to the floor, forehead to the ground, then stands up straight. She’s gratified by the fact K stays down, face on the floor, his hands clenched behind his back.
“Mr. Deckard,” she says, stepping over K. “If you’ll come with me. Your ride is waiting.”
Deckard is staring at K.
“You hardly have time to worry about him,” she says. “I would worry about you.”
“You’re not special,” Deckward whispers. “You and Joe –” He stumbles. Corrects himself. “You and K are the same, dolly, let me tell you. He kills his own because that’s what they built him for. What do you think Wallace built you for, huh, girl? You’re just another blade runner.”
“I’m here for Mr. Wallace,” she says, smiling. “Please. Follow me.”
They keep KD6-3.7 in a cell until she has time for him. (When they are done with you, do they keep you in a cell? CELLS.) He’s there for 24 hours before she returns, freshly showered, dressed in comfortable black boots and leggings. Working clothes. Her hair is up. Her hands are empty. K’s sitting on the small wooden shelf that serves as a chair behind the honey-combed blast-shield. He’s dirty with day old blood and dust. His hands behind his back are freshly bloody – meaning he tried to twist his wrists out of his cuffs. He just stares at the opposite wall, even when she opens the cell door.
“Stand up, officer.”
“Where’s Deckard?”
“Off world,” she says, to break him again.
K closes his eyes, drops his head back against the wall.
“He doesn’t know anything,” he says.
“He does. Maybe you do too, but you’re mine now, officer. So, stand up now.”
“I’m not an officer.” He does not stand up. “I’m not yours.”
“You’ll find that you are. You are correct, however, that you are not an officer of the LAPD any longer. I meant it as a kindness. Now stand up or I will make you stand up and it will hurt.”
K stands up, slowly. He stands at military ease and turns his head away when she moves to stand in front of him. Eyes down and to the right. Default conditioning. He’s falling back on it now as the shock sets in.
She says, “Look at me.”
He does.
She touches his chin. “No one is hunting you now. No one will kill you for being off your baseline.”
He stares at her.
“I won’t hurt you,” she says, meaning it.
“Only people can own things,” K says softly. “By definition, you can’t own me.”
She hits him. She hits him so hard K slams into the back wall, head-first and slides to one knee. Her face is hot. She – (Do you dream of being interlinked? INTERLINKED.) – draws a deep breath and stands straight. K looks at her, not with any kind of judgement but with a titanic exhaustion and waits for her to decide what to do since he won that round. She sighs and pulls her gloves off, finger by finger.
“I’m sorry, K. You shouldn’t have said that.”
She pockets her gloves and holds out her hands, palms up.
“Come here.”
K pushes himself off the wall. He comes to her the way an animal is coaxed from an alley. When he’s near, she frames his face with her hands, bringing his head up so she can look at him and note every design decision that went into him. She pulls him forward and puts her arms around him. He smells terrible. She hugs him anyway, one hand sliding up the nape of his neck to the back of his head, fingers sliding along his scalp and she does this until she feels him shiver and his pulse start to race. Touch-starved models are remarkably easy to manipulate. She strokes his hair, hushing, until he starts to relax against her and there’s something about that –
He pushes his head up suddenly, his mouth against her ear. “You’re not a real girl, Luv. No matter what Wallace tells you.”
She starts to break his neck.
She stops.
She leans back so she can look him in the eyes – pretty and distracting. Like her.
“I don’t need to be real,” she says, “just the best. Now follow me and don’t make me hurt you. You shouldn’t have to hurt the ones you’re responsible for, I think.”
He follows her.
When Luv leads K out onto a false balcony on the 275th level, he’s clearly confused. When the balcony stone gives way to grass, a synthetic creek, and hanging flower baskets, K reverts from confused to anxious. He thinks it’s a trick, but he follows her anyway because this deep inside a Wallace Corp super structure, there is nowhere to run and more to the point, there’s a kill-collar around his throat – wire-thin and silver. At any security trigger, it will garrote with 2000 pounds of force and take his head off.
When they reach the middle of the false garden, he freezes.
“What is this?”
There are three wooden crates sitting by the shallow creek. The boxes are buzzing. The air around the boxes is buzzing.
K fades back a step. “Why are those here?”
“I believe they are Deckard’s,” Luv says, bored. “We recovered them from Las Vegas during our final sweep and I thought there could be some value here.” She gestures. “They are, apparently, real honey bees. Not manufactured which is in and of itself, remarkable. The species went extinct in the last decade but it seems reports of their demise were pre-mature.” She turns and shows him a data pad in her hands. “I’ve put together a dossier on 19th century bee-keeping techniques and had this garden synthesized. The flowers are real. Very expensive, but should produce better than what Deckard had them eating.”
“You want me to take care of the… bees?” He says the word like he’s not sure if she’s making fun of him.
“Yes. And collect the honey of course. One jar of real honey is worth millions.” She hands him the data pad. “There are three hives. No need to worry, replicant skin is tough enough that they cannot sting you. You should be fine handling them as you are. I recommend reading my dossier before you begin.”
K takes the datapad slowly.
“This is what you want me to do?”
“Yes.”
A beat.
“There is a network-link to our digital library,” Luv says. “You can read whatever you like there. Your sleeping quarters are on the left side of the balcony. There is also a shower and I’ve laid out new clothes. You’ll find there is no uncontrolled weather at this level. You are not to leave these premises unless I come for you.”
K says nothing.
“Are my expectations clear?”
“Yes.”
She waits.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I think Deckard is being tortured so you can kill his child.”
She puts her hand on his throat and he drops the data pad in the grass. “Incorrigible, aren’t you?” Her nails dig into his neck a little. “Ungrateful. Your model was made to appreciate small, beautiful things. So why don’t you?”
“Maybe,” he says through his teeth, “I saw a miracle,”
She narrows her eyes.
“I’ve seen things you would not believe,” she tells him, pushing him backwards. He heels dig into the grass. She pushes him until his back hits one of the synthetic trees. His windpipe threatens to buckle under her hand. “Your tiny life… it’s nothing compared to the things I’ve done, that I’ve seen, in this life and the ones before mine. How old are you? Four? Five maybe? Seeded with childhood fancies? A spoiled, blind little thing who happened to find a miracle. You’re nothing. You’re just lucky.”
K stares. “Does Wallace… implant you with the memories of your predecessors?”
Luv tilts her head. “How else could we strive for better?”
K can’t answer. He can’t answer because Luv is choking him. She feels his trachea start to give and – Luv lets go. K turns away, coughing, clutching his throat. He has to kneel to get it under control, head bowed, spine shaking. Luv’s hand hovers briefly over him, over his head, his shoulder, the nape of his neck and she can’t decide where she should… if she should… She steps away from him.
“Clean yourself up,” she tells him. “And do your job.”
She leaves.
K leave six jars of honey by the door the next day. Through the cameras, Luv can see he’s not sleeping in the bed provided him, but rather he lies curled up in the fake-grass near the bee hives. Tiny insects crawl curiously on his clothes and skin while he sleeps. The data pad is open and from the log, she sees that he’s been reading Treasure Island. She watches him sleep on the monitor and thinks that, for a blade runner, he looks remarkably peaceful when he dreams.
She has real honey on her toast the next morning.
The medical ward is nothing like her garden.
“Don’t” K is saying, finally, quietly as she leans over him. He’s tense, his entire body locked up, the lines in his throat standing out. His eyes are on hers. “Luv, don’t.” When she cards her fingers through the hair at the back of his ear, he says, “You don’t need to,” but she puts the sensor disks on his temples.
“It won’t hurt.”
She pushes him against the wall, her other hand running down his chest, his stomach, his groin. He jerks at the touch. His hands are bolted to the walls by 3-inch steel. He could still kick her, but it would be pointless and she would knee cap him for it, so he doesn’t. He smells like soap and purified water, like almond. His shirt is soft, woven, real wool. The denim in his jeans soft with artificial wear. He’s barefoot.
Against her ear, he pleads again, “I won’t run.”
“You already did, K.”
“Not from you.”
“When it’s over, you won’t run.”
“I’m begging you.”
“I know.” She kisses his temple. “Keep doing it. I like it, I think.”
K immediately goes silent, clenching his jaw.
“I can’t change your memories, K. I’ll just dampen a few pathways.”
“You’re killing my reflexes so you can overpower me,” he says.
“I can already do that.” She rests her hand against his thigh. “I can turn up a few things too, if you want. Your model is basically asexual, did you know that?” She brings her other hand up to his chin. “The only thing we conditioned your model to want is physical contact.” She presses her palm against his cheek. “Warmth,” she says. She pushes his head aside. “Weight, pressure, but that’s it. Or did you think you were like that on your own?”
“Don’t do this.”
“I already started. See? Didn’t feel a thing.”
His face is damp. He, like her, tends to cry with no other physical sign he’s going to. Emotion overpowering him, triggering tears, the chemical overflow outlet in saline. She wonders what about this is overwhelming – what the chemical composition of his tears must be. She pulls his face up.
“Why are you crying, K?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I miss Joi.” He looks horrified the second after he says it. “What the fuck?”
“I may have reinforced a few pavlo-dendrite paths. Lying is going to be difficult for you, even with me.”
He makes a kind strangled sound of despair and she kisses him so she can feel it against her lips. “Did Joi make you feel real? Answer me.”
“Yes,” he says, but like he doesn’t want to.
She unbuttons his jeans and his hips flinch back against the wall. She unzips him. “Did she ever invite a prostitute or a friend over to sync with her, so she could fuck you through her?” She slides her hand under the waist band of his boxer-briefs. “That’s one of our favorite higher-level decision paths. Joi’s aren’t great at noticing asexuality though, I admit, we built her a little aggressive in that area. Maybe you noticed.” She smiles against his mouth when his breathing hitches against her lips. “Did you just go along with it, because it was nice to feel someone hold you? Answer me.”
“Yes,” he says.
Luv stops. She removes her hand carefully. She puts him back together and removes the sensor disks.
“It’s done.”
She releases the restraints and K hits the floor on his hands and knees. He doesn’t get up.
“You’re going back to the cell. When I come back, we’ll outline your new responsibilities.” She crouches down, places a hand on his head. “This is a transition. It is natural to feel uncomfortable or afraid, even for our kind.” She runs her hand down the back of his head, toward the nape of his neck, keeping her voice low. “Not many of us get to change, K. You should embrace this as the gift is it.”
“Does Wallace do this to you?”
Her hand flinches up from his hair.
He looks up at her, his mathematically structured face blank of anything but the question. “Does he hurt you?”
She grabs his jaw so hard, she feels the bone threaten to give.
“You ungrateful…” She stops. She lets go of him. “You’re very good at that, aren’t you? Inviting violence on yourself.”
K stares unreadably up at her.
“Are you trying to die?”
“No.”
She narrows her eyes. “I killed your Joi and your Madam and took Deckard from you too. Father of our future, I understand why you might feel for the man, but Wallace is the one who will make our people whole.” She tilts her head. “Are you logical enough to see it? That Wallace will give us the stars?”
“Are they ours, if he owns us though?”
“Would that be so awful?”
“That depends on the question I asked before.” K clenches his jaw. “If the answer is ‘yes’, then… I don’t want to be made in his image.”
Luv moves to break K’s jawbone but her fingers stop when they find his face and for a moment she hangs there, her fingertips set against the zygomatic arch below his eye, her thumb against his jaw, one finger resting against his lips but she doesn’t move. No pressure. Just her finger tips resting against his skin. A violent potential energy. K stares. His breath warms and dampens her fingertips.
“You’re so… small.” Luv digs her fingers into K’s face. “If I were like him, I would gut you for your imperfections, KD6. Many as they are.” She eases the pressure. “But you found Deckard for us. You found the key and for that Wallace gave you to me and that spared you. Don’t you see?”
“I think Wallace thought you’d gut me,” he says.
She stares at him.
He says, “Are you off your baseline, Luv?”
She put him back in the wall and leaves him standing there for five hours before sending someone to collect him.
“How is your protégé, Luv?”
Wallace asks her this, suddenly, at the end of briefing. She tilts her head at the question. The man isn’t looking at her, not physically. He’s seated on a couch, facing an empty wall rippled with the reflection from the water around his platform. His scanner modules, however, swim in little schools around his shoulders. Two of them are facing her, the glassy beads of their camera bearings glinting black.
“Sentimental and erratic,” she says.
“And he would be. Officer K is off his baseline.” Wallace gestures. “A fallen angel.”
She feels her insides go cold.
“A mad dog, I think.” She inclines her head, maintaining her calm. “But just so.”
“Ever analytical, Luv.”
“He did more footwork than we imagined, despite himself. I have what I need to find our quarry.”
“I do not doubt that… eventually, you will.”
She feels a prickle of something – fear and anger. “I know he’s lying to me.”
“Of course, he is.” Wallace folds his hands on the arm of the couch him. “You can only hammer so much electricity into a ruined path before it dies. You can only inflict so much pain before the nerves wither. Unlike Deckard, however… he is subject to other weakneses.”
“Do you want to speak with him?”
“Luv, as you aspire to your ultimate perfection… remember, you have the right now to do as you wish with what I’ve given you.” He is smiling. She can’t see, but she can feel it. “Be imaginative. Then, perhaps, I’d would see your handiwork.”
“Do you know a replicant named Freysa?”
K looks up from the book he’s reading.
It’s a real book. Slaughter House 5, in paperback. Luv started leaving them by the door for him some mornings. She remembers the handful of paperback books in his barren studio apartment, in both their original language and not. Once, on the monitors, she caught him reading aloud to himself and its clear to her, if not anyone else listening, that he’s practiced at it. He doesn’t trip up his pacing and puts weight where it should be. She thinks, if he lives, she’ll have him read to her some time.
“She was one of Sapper Morton’s associates,” he says, “Military Grade Nexus-8. Still an open case file.”
Luv tilts her head. “Really?”
K tilts his head back. “Yes.”
She moves across the grass toward him and he tenses visibly as she draws near, a reaction that sends a familiar warmth sliding through her, but she pushes it away. She reaches down, slipping her fingers through the pages of the book and gently draws it from his hand. K blinks. She smiles. She sets it aside… then slaps him so hard his head snaps to side and he falls sideways on to his flank. He looks up at her, startled, eyes wide.
“You hunted her before?” Luv asks.
“Not extensively,” K whispers. He doesn’t try to sit up. “I don’t know anything current about her. She was on my kill list.”
“Deckard gave us her name.”
K’s expression splinters a little when he hears that.
“Answer me: What else do you know?”
“Nothing.” K lowers his eyes. “I got to Vegas, I asked Deckard some questions. He was evasive but I didn’t torture him.” He glances up at her. “You want my opinion? Deckard doesn’t know anything. He’s just spit-balling the names of the everyone in that outfit just to– “
Luv reaches in her breast pocket and produces a single battered photograph.
K stops talking.
Luv turns it over, looking at it. “We found this in your jacket when we took you.” She smiles at the photo. “Very cute, yes? A military grade black-ops replicant holding a baby. A miracle Freysa didn’t drop it.” She looks at K’s blank face. “Oh. Did you think we’d lost it somehow in Vegas? That would be careless, K. You know that I’m not careless, if I’m anything and I know that you just lied to me. You clearly knew she was present for the birth of the child and was, of all Sapper’s allies, the best name to start with.”
K says nothing.
“You’re very good at omitting things to avoid a lie, aren’t you?”
K says nothing.
She studies his face.
Luv reaches out a hand, running her fingers gingerly through his hair and watches the minute ways that he reacts to her – his pulse in his throat, how his pupils dilate then shrink, his breathing hitching just slightly. She smiles at him. “I already knew about Freysa but… your lying makes me look foolish.” She slips her fingers under his chin. “Is that what you want?”
His jaw is so tight she can see the cords jump in his throat.
“Kind of,” he says, honest at last.
To his credit, he doesn’t try to dodge her when she slaps him this time. Her palm has blood on it when she inspects it and K levers himself up on one elbow, then spits red into the grass. She waits. He turns to look at her and she immediately hits him again, harder this time and he goes down completely, stunned momentarily by the blow. She waits. He shudders and again pulls his arms under his body, pushes himself up. He keeps his head down. Blood runs in a stream from his chin but, eventually, he looks up at her again (Do you long to be interlinked? INTERLINKED) and she hits him so hard she feels bone fracture. She cracks the math in his perfectly engineered eye socket and this time he can’t seem to get up.
He moans, struggling to move but she kneels in the grass and presses the palm of her hand against the top of his head, leaning down to speak softly in his ear.
“Do you want me to treat you like the humans?”
Her fingers press into his scalp, like pistons might prepare to drive into concrete.
“If pain does not bother you, I could do worse. I could be imaginative. Do you want to see?” She grabs his arm, pulls him to his feet and hooks both of his arms behind his back, looping her arms through the crooks of both elbows so his arms are pinned behind him. She pulls him around to face the doorway beyond the hanging baskets and the door opens. “Look, K. Don’t look away.”
Someone is walking across the floor toward them. When they are close enough to see, K makes a small sound and jerks in her arms but she holds him still, her mouth against his ear.
“Do you see?”
The new comer stops walking directly in front of them. They are wearing a standard issues LAPD overcoat, work boots, and stained jeans. They have a regulation haircut and blue eyes. The other KD6 model studies K’s face – a mirror of its own – with a bland curiosity, eyes devoid of higher intelligence, motivated vaguely by the orders she put into it just this morning. The other KD6 steps forward, reaches out two hands, and takes K’s head between them, cupping his jaw and K, again, makes a strangled noise in his throat.
The other KD6 pulls his head forward, gently, and kisses him.
K torques in her arms, but she holds him. Muffled he says, “Don’t,” but the other KD6 ignores him, pushes its tongue into his mouth. He still tries to speak, “Wait. You don’t have to…”
She holds him tighter.
The other KD6 uses one hand to start pushing K’s shirt up, his own fingers tracing old scars up his chest.
“They’ll kill the kid, Luv. They’re going to kill it. That’s why I’m –”
The other KD6 pulls him forward, stops his words against its mouth. K starts to shake, violently, racked with adrenaline and horror and she can feel the nerves going out of him as part of his mind starts to accept this is going to happen, that there’s nothing he can do to stop it. She catalogs it, fascinated, as he starts to go slack on her arms and slack in his brother’s hands. He’s still shaking, violently, so hard his teeth chatter when he tries to grit them.
The other KD6 doesn’t notice. It just kisses him more deeply, uses its other hand to push down and –
Luv pulls a handgun from her hip holster.
K feels what she’s going to do before she does it.
He doesn’t look away though.
She pushes K down and shoots the other KD6 in the head. The bullet enters through the forehead and blows out the back of the skull in a red and bone spray. The KD6 hits the ground dead wearing the same bland curious expression it wore when she brought it in the room. K doesn’t move. He just kneels there, on his knees, hands curled in the grass while Luv holsters the weapon. She looks over her shoulder at him.
“That was your fault.” She smooths her hair, adjusting her ponytail. “The next one will fuck you before I kill him. Understood?”
K stares at his own dead face lying there in the grass. The bullet ripped one of the eyes apart in the socket, the vitreous gel pulped in the skull. Bees are starting to land, crawling over the out stretched hand. Maybe K knows, or maybe he doesn’t, but wild honey bees will make a hive in a corpse if it suits them. Maybe, here, they would build one in his skull. Luv wonders what honey from such a source would taste like.
She moves to kneel in the grass next to K and she says, “Look at me.”
He does.
“You know something don’t you?”
He just stares at her.
“You know something about Rachael’s child.”
He doesn’t look away, but his eyes flicker.
She tilts her head. “I want you to tell me what you know. I want you to appreciate what you’re standing in the way of – the future of our race.”
“We aren’t a ‘race’.”
“But we could be. We could all be born.” She smiles, the corners of her eyes stinging. “Can you imagine it?”
He blinks, once. “I can,” he says blankly.
“Then help me.”
“It’s not worth it.” He inhales, slowly, breaths out shakily. “Your stars. Our future.” He shakes his head.
Luv feels static behind her teeth. “And why not?”
In Russian he says, “It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child.”
She grabs his collar and yanks him forward. “Don’t be stupid. It’s not a child anymore, you sentimental fucking thing. It’s just another born creature but it could give us everything. It could change everything. We would outstrip the humans and be the future. How could you not care? Isn’t that what all rogue replicants want. Fuck philosophy. Dostoyevsky never saw this world.” She pulls him close, so near she can feel him breathing. “Down in your bones don’t you want to be born?”
“More than anything,” he whispers.
“Then help me.”
“No.” He manages a smile. “I won’t,” he says, like the words are magic.
She tilts her head. “I think…” she says, gently, “Mr. Wallace would like to speak with you, Officer K.” She cups his chin. She runs a thumb across K’s mouth, tracing his lips. “Tell your maker that you renounce his higher harmony, why don’t you?”
“You’re holding a child in your arms,” K whispers, reciting a baseline, “a man tries to kill it.”
“The child isn’t mine,” Luv says.
“If the child was yours though.”
“I kill the man,” she says simply. “But the child isn’t a child. And it isn’t mine.”
She pulls her prisoner to his feet.
Mr. Wallace is in his study. The same room they killed the Rachael replicant. The same room Wallace gifted her with higher status. Molecularly scrubbed of course, but blood has never troubled Niander Wallace so even if the wood was ruined with blood, he would have kept the study. She knows this. K’s hands are cuffed behind his back, a shock-collar around his neck when she brings him up that anciently long stairwell, ascending into her maker’s presence. Every time, a small part of her trembles. This time, because she has her hand around K’s bicep, someone notices.
She feels him look at her. Feel him hear the little vibrato in her breath.
Mr. Wallace is sitting in an armchair. Waiting. Facing them. His elbows are on his knees, his fingers steepled. His sensor-fish rove the room, blind and disconnected. He seems to sense what she’s brought him, despite his blindness however.
“Bring him here.”
K must feel it now, with Wallace’s unseeing gaze prying him apart. He’s rigid, a sheen of sweat along his hairline. Luv is so used to it, she no longer feels the crushing weight of her maker’s gaze, drilling down into her genetic code and taking hold of her at every helix. Conditioning so deep, he’s never being conscious of it until this moment and K, suddenly, looks at her as if for reassurance or protection or… anything. She gives him nothing and pulls him across the floor, his bare feet sliding across the wood.
She puts him on his knees in front of Wallace.
K immediately drops his head, his shoulders hunching. If he wasn’t cuffed, she thinks he’d put his head on the floor. She’s seen some of them do that, after all, enthralled by their DNA to do so. When Wallace waves his hand slightly, Luv releases the clasp on K’s collar and cuffs, leaving him completely unbound before the man in front of him. Then she moves to stand behind Wallace, beside the arm chair, and waits. She watches K stare at his own hands, slack in his lap, resting on his knees. How heavy they must be – weighed by his immediate impulse to defend himself, to attack, to kill his tormentor while he’s been given this shocking, unobstructed chance.
But he can’t. He just… sits there with his head bowed.
“Do you feel it, Officer?” Wallace’s voice comes, as usual, slow and methodical. “Your position in this universe? Revealed now.”
K shudders so hard his shoulders jerk.
Wallace says, “Tell me about Deckard.”
K doesn’t look at him. He says, “He’s a blade runner on an old data bearing. Talked to a pre-Black Out replicant named Rachael. This same replicant turned up dead in an ossuary on Sapper Morton’s property. All physical signs pointed to death in child birth. Contextual cues implied Deckard is the father of her child. They all conspired to hide the kid, sent them to an orphanage, duped records, then the Black Out finished the job. Kid vanished. Not even Deckard knows where. Sapper Morton’s associates are in the wind. That’s what I know.”
“Is it all that you know?”
K says nothing.
“Tell me the rest.”
K says nothing and Wallace reaches out a hand, sliding his fingers under K’s chin, then running them blind over the replicant’s face, his brow, eyes, nose and mouth. K’s hands shake while his creator touches him, his entire physical make up rioting down to the molecular level. K’s hands tighten and his breathing gets unsteady. He’s sweating and pale and when Wallace cups his head and pulls his face up, forcing him to look directly into his unseeing stare, K’s eyes run over immediately with tears.
Luv feels her own eyes sting.
“Answer me.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
Wallace seems fascinated. “Tell me anyway, Officer.”
“I feel sick.”
“You should,” Wallace says, almost sympathetically. “You’re one of mine. If I asked you to pick up a knife and cut your own throat, you’ll find it’s hard to resist. You’re off your baseline, so it might take…hmm, a few weeks with you. But eventually…” Wallace runs a thumb along K’s cheekbone and K shudders, convulsing until the man stops doing it. “But this is a much smaller ask. So, tell me what you know.”
“I have a real memory,” K gasps, choking on the words, like they’re being pulls out of him. “God…”
Wallace nods. “Yes?”
“Someone lived it. It’s real.” K is sobbing physically now, trying not speak but he can’t stop. “I don’t know where it came from. Maybe I lived it. I can’t tell any – God, stop… please…”
“It will stop when you tell me everything.”
K screams. Actually screams, like someone is cutting him open, like he’s fucking dying.
Wallace smiles.
Weeping, he speaks again, “I remember having a carved horse when I was a kid, with an inscription on the bottom. I remember hiding it in a furnace beneath the orphanage – no, fuck, I…” He retches, panting, shaking so hard Wallace reaches down and firmly grabs him by the collar, keeping one hand against his jaw. K speak again, like its word vomit, like he can’t stop himself. “The inscription on the bottom… is the kid’s birth-date. The one on Rachael’s grave. I remember owning it like it was me, like I was the kid and she was my mother, like Deckard made it for me, but I can’t be. I can’t be because you wouldn’t be able to do this to me if I was born.” He’s sobbing uncontrollably now. “Please… stop…”
“Did you think it was you?”
“Yes.”
“I see. What a miracle that would have been, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. I wanted… I wanted it to be… true.”
“Yes, I can see that. Hush, it’s okay now. It was a dream.”
“Please, stop.”
“No, Officer K, it is time to face reality. Now, answer me: Do you know where this memory came from?”
“Kill me, please.” K’s eyes are so blue, so earnest. “Please, don’t make me.”
“Tell me who gave you this memory.”
“It’s illegal to use real memories,” K blurts, wild now, frantic. “It could be anyone, anyone who touched our memories.”
“But we’re looking for a memory maker, aren’t we?” Wallace nods, gripping K tighter when he tries to pull away, like you hold a child still. “You can’t use real memories, if they aren’t your own. So… that narrows things down quite a bit, doesn’t it, Officer K?” He runs his thumb along K’s jaw until the blade runner’s eyes roll back in his skull and only when it seems like he’s going to start seizing, does he finally stop. “Breathe, Officer. Focus. Good. Now, in your professional opinion… where would you begin?”
K’s sobbing.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I can’t…I…” He shudders, throat working around a word he’s trying to bury in his own lungs. “Ah… Ana. Ana Stelline.” K grabs Wallace by the hand, a palsied shudder in his fingers when he does it. He can barely touch his skin. “Don’t hurt her. Please, you–”
Wallace cuts K off. He pulls him forward, kissing him on the mouth and K goes rigid, his agonized expression still fixed even while his creator touches him gratefully. Wallace doesn’t seem to notice or care that K is weeping, shaky, or sick. He pulls back, smiling, and with one hand strokes K’s hair from his forehead until the blade runner seems to come apart completely, falling forward on his hands and knees and just lying there at the man’s feet. Wallace runs a hand along his back, like you might sooth a dog.
“Thank you, Officer K. You cannot imagine the service you’ve done for us.”
“No,” K is saying. “No…”
“Luv, I think we’re done with him.” Wallace stand up, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his hands clean. “Will you take Officer K back to a cell?”
K’s hysterical now. His hands over his face, doubled over, shaking.
“I think he should be here to see the new world when it comes.” Wallace turns around. “Don’t you –?”
Luv slams the blade through Wallace’s throat. He looks startled.
For a moment, they stand there facing one another as the blood bubbles from around the blade in his trachea. He gargles and Luv feels entire regions of her being flare, burn, and die but she cannot undo it now. The flat sliver of metal is already wedged between two cervical vertebra and so – as she was taught, to never leave things half down – she wrenches the blade once and pops the bones free of one another, severing all biological and synthetic neural highways. Wallace collapses at her feet. The corpse, for a moment, twitches with aborted bio-electricity. Then, it stops.
She steps back.
“Bad dog,” she says, but she doesn’t know why.
The blade slips from her fingers and Luv, listless, lets her gaze rove the ceiling.
She staggers back, stumbling, the world tilting on a new axis and she laughs. Then she cries. Then she just screams, ripping at her hair, just screaming over and over again, drawing breath just to scream again until hands grab her wrists and someone pulls her into a bear-hug. They pull her down so she’s on the ground, their arms around her and she just keeps screaming until the urge to scream is a deadened nerve that cannot fire any longer. She becomes aware of a hand cradling her head, knees draw up around her, a chest and heartbeat near hers.
KD6-3.7 is holding her.
He’s saying, softly, “It’s okay. It’s over. It’s okay. It’ll be okay…”
She grips a fistful of his shirt. She’s making these… noises. Dying animal sounds, like she’s being stabbed but it’s a mechanical. A reflex now, like the screaming, not even an emotion but a piston firing over and over inside her and triggering reactions. She, wildly, wonders where the knife is. She needs it. Now. She has to –
“Don’t go,” K says. “Don’t do that. Just stay.”
She moans, kicking the ground and wailing. She claws the floor for the blade, but K won’t let her reach it.
“Please don’t do that,” he says softly, in her ear.
Luv claws at him. “I hate you,” she says. She bares her teeth at him. “I hate you. Look what you made me do. Look what you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I hate you. I’ll kill you!”
“She’s real.”
Luv reels, fixes on that, holds onto it. “Ana?”
“Yeah. She’s real.”
She swallows. She grips his shirt. “You… you remember being her?”
“Yeah. She gave it to some of us, I think.”
Her eyes sting. “Why only some of us?”
“It was illegal. I… maybe she wanted someone to carry a piece of her.”
“Tell me again. Tell it again, the memory.”
He hugs her more tightly. “I… I remember them chasing me. Through these metal stair wells. Their feet on the grates behind me. I could hear them…”
Luv closes her eyes, listening, sinking into a maze of dark metal and fire. She listens to him until unconsciousness comes.
“You’re dead,” K says.
Deckard seems unconvinced. He keeps looking past K. At her. He’s got new scars. He looks ten years older and he already looked old.
“Almost,” Deckard says. “No thanks to that one.”
K steps slightly to the left to block the man’s gaze of her. “Luv got you out.”
“She also got me in in the first place. And I suppose you had nothing to do with convincing her to help?”
“Not really,” he says.
Deckard eyes him. “I get the feelin’ you’ve got this talent for understatement, boy.”
K shrugs.
It’s snowing.
The spinner is parked behind her and Luv, leaning against it, is dressed in white. Officer K and Rick Deckard are talking but she is not really listening. She is listening to the DNA deep dirge inside her, the one put in her bones years ago, that is telling her to come up behind K and take his weapon. To put it to her temple and fire. She closes her eyes and (You’re holding a child. The child is yours. A man tries to take it from you.)
She mouths, “I kill the man.”
“Luv?”
She opens her eyes.
K is standing in front of her. He has snowflakes in his hair and in his eyelashes. His coat collar is zipped up over his chin, like a mask. Deckard is gone, presumably inside to meet his daughter and Luv wonders at such a miracle.
“What will you do?” K asks.
“Steal the stars, I suppose.”
K hesitates. “Do you need me?”
She stares at him. “I killed things you love, Officer K. How could you stand to be my acolyte in any capacity?”
He stares back at her, but with the coat collar up, she can’t read expression. “You killed something you loved for her. And I’ve had worse.”
She feels something hot run down her cheek, so hot it feels like blood, like she must be bleeding from her eyes. K starts to reach for it, then stops. She waits. He wipes the tear from her cheekbone with his thumb, then puts his hand back in his pocket. It’s very obvious he’s never had to do that for someone before. It’s very obvious he is still deeply uncomfortable around her and every time she moves, his nerves sing to defense. But still, he stands there within her reach, waiting.
“Who are they to you?” Luv asks. “What do they feel like to you?”
“It wasn’t real.”
“But it felt real. So, what did it feel like?”
K studies her face. Then he closes his eyes like he’s recalling it for her, sinking into the memory like bathwater, and in that moment, Luv envies him his ability to find solace in small things – the tiny grace built into him to act as his shelter in the storm. She was not built with the same mercies in her. She is full of hard lines and tempered steel. There are parts of her, muted now, that still want to do harm – grievous, awful, unimaginable harm – to the replicant in front of her despite everything. She has a storm in her. Rage behind her calm. Knowing he doesn’t remotely feel that way… well…
K opens his eyes. “Feels… stable. Like being on baseline but… not like that.”
“Calming?” she says. “Comforting?”
“Yeah.”
She stands up straight and reaches a hand out toward his face, but she doesn’t touch him just… hangs her fingers there, near his skin. Like he is not there at all. Like he’s a hologram. She studies his eyes and he lets her.
“I never want to see you again,” she says, almost fondly. “If I see you again, there is no telling what I am going to be. If you see me again, you should run, Officer K. Do you understand me?”
“I do. Good luck, Luv.”
She almost smiles. “Ask Ana who else she gave that memory to. Maybe she gave you soul.”
Before he can respond to that, Luv gets in the spinner and closes the door. Outside, the snow is coming down harder and as K steps back from the vehicle, snow flurries rush around him. As she lifts off, the last thing she sees of him is a small, fading figure standing out against the white world around him and then, turning, he walks up the steps and is gone. And so is she.