Free Replicant Night by K. W. Jeter Page A

again.
    "You're a cool customer, Deckard-you know that?" Whatever parts of Batty had been encoded and placed inside the briefcase, his snake-twisting mind and sharp-eyed perceptions, now sounded impressed despite himself. "Nothing fazes you. You've reached some kind of weird point where nothing surprises you anymore, but you're still walking around as if you're alive somehow. That's a hell of an achievement."
    Deckard shifted in the thinly padded seat, trying to find some comfort for his bones and muscles. "What am I supposed to be so surprised about?"
    "For Christ's sake, Deckard-I'm in a fucking box. With a handle and two chrome-plated locks and a decent grade of simulated leather on the exterior." Annoyance permeated the briefcase's speech. "Shit-you mean you didn't notice ?"
    "I noticed." Deckard couldn't keep a thin smile from lifting one corner of his mouth. "Actually, I prefer you this way."
    "Yeah, well, it doesn't suit me at all. They should've left me at least one leg and a foot, so I could kick your sorry ass." The disgust in Batty's voice shifted to its former perplexed condition. "Don't you wonder how this all came about? The last time you saw me, I was dead . I even got shown photographs of how I looked, hanging upside-down on that busted-up freeway. Seeing your own corpse is one of those transformative experiences-"
    "Thought you didn't have eyes."
    "There's a jack for an optical scanner inside here. Along with some other stuff like that. Besides, why should you care how I saw it? That's not important, Deckard. What you should be worrying about is why all of this is being done. Why drag my corpse off, why download my skull contents into this contraption-the whole trip. Hey, it's all for your benefit, pal. Or at least most of it. If you can't display gratitude, you could at least show some curiosity ."
    "I don't have to," Deckard said dryly. "I'm sure you're going to tell me all about it, whether I want to hear it or not."
    He'd been telling the truth to Batty. Deckard could let an unsoothing but necessary sleep claim him, where he pushed back in the skiff's pilot seat, with little regret. That his old nemesis, a nightmarish figure all glistening with rain and smeared blood over taut muscle and sinew, could come back from the dead in the form of an articulate briefcase-what was there to be surprised about? Stranger things had already happened. Once before, he'd thought Roy Batty was safely dead, only to find out otherwise-or rather, to find out that one Batty was dead, and another, claiming to be the human original from which the replicant had been made, was trying to kill him. And coming close to accomplishing that goal. If it hadn't been for Dave Holden, who put a highcaliber slug between Batty's eyes, Deckard knew that it would've been his own corpse draped over the side of one of L.A's ruined freeways.
    And now Holden was dead, with his former partner from the LAPD's blade runner unit fairly sure that he at least wouldn't be coming around again. The corpse on the floor back at the Outer Hollywood studio had appeared more than final; Holden's blanked-out eyes had looked as if they had gazed at last upon and into some soul-quieting vista of peace. Maybe, thought Deckard, that's what he saw when he looked down the barrel of the Kowalski replicant's gun . Fire and thunder, and then the silence beyond ...
    "Oh, you'll find out soon enough." Batty's voice seemed to come from miles away, a distance bound by the cockpit's tiny space. "You don't have to worry about that."
    That was a mystery almost worth puzzling out. Deckard let the black behind his eyelids deepen and swallow him up. The briefcase with Batty's personality wired in and Deckard's initials below the handle-that's what the now-dead Holden had been carrying, had come all that way from Earth to deliver to him. There'd been a time when Batty and Holden had been working together, trying to kill Deckard, claiming that he was another escaped replicant; that