Free Eye and Talon by K. W. Jeter Page A

Deckard had asked an obvious, and logical, question in return. Owls of any kind weren't seen every day.
    Of course —
    'Freeze sequence,' Iris instructed the surresper. Now that she'd heard it correctly, it didn't make any sense. 'Back five seconds, resume sequence action.'
    The woman's image said it again, in her cold, unemotional tone: Of course .
    Meaning that the owl was artificial, as Deckard had asked. Or that the woman had believed, at that time, that it was.
    Iris listened to the rest of the image's 'dialogue.
    Must be expensive . Deckard again.
    Very , said the woman's image.
    Iris halted the surresper's playback once more. The words, these in addition to the others, made even less sense than they had before. She stepped closer to the woman's frozen image, studying it, trying to figure out if that one word had been either a deliberate lie or a simple mistake. An artificial owl of this quality would have been expensive, all right, but not enough to brag about. Larger and more complicated avian simulacra, emus and ostriches and the like, even down to nanotech-stuffed hummingbirds, could be obtained easily enough, at the souk in the center of LA. A noodle stand could afford a mascot like that; Iris herself patronized one down the street that had a brace of artificial fresh-water arawanas swimming in a tank behind the cash register; those fish had never been anywhere near the Amazon where their biological prototypes had been sourced. Whereas a genuine living owl, sitting on a perch at company headquarters, would have really been something for a Tyrell Corporation representative to brag so haughtily about; that kind of expenditure, on top of the, already lavishly appointed surroundings, would have indicated a whole other level of wealth and power.
    'Thinking?' The chat tapped at her shin with one of its tiny paws. She nodded. "Tis a mystery.' Her words were followed by a shrug. 'But that's the kind of thing I get paid to figure out.'
    There was one more scrap of information to be gotten out of the second discrete sequence on the surresper. At the very end of the bit, the image of the woman spoke her name. Iris played it back, to make sure she got it right.
    I'm Rachael.
    That was what the woman had told the cop named Deckard. Iris mentally filed the info away, and forgot about it for the time being. She had more important things to worry about right now, such as where this missing owl had gotten to. This woman in the data she'd fed to the surresper, Rachael whoever, had probably been caught up in the collapse of the Tyrell Corporation, along with everybody else who had been connected to the replicant-manufacturing company. Not a big deal — at least that part wasn't.
    'Go back to the first discrete sequence.' The room with the cop named Deckard and the snotty young woman disappeared, replaced
    by the other illusory one that held the owl and the late Dr Eldon Tyrell. With his silver bowl on the antique writing desk, and the white rat he had tossed onto the center of the room's intricately loomed Oriental rug . . .
    This time, Iris watched the sequence all the way through. The owl did what its own biological nature had programmed it to do. The claws that catch, Iris found herself thinking, remembering some scrap of a nonsense poem. It wasn't nonsense to the white rat, whose programming was to die.
    The image of the owl flapped to its perch, where it bloodily disassembled its meal. Still coldly smiling, the image of Dr Tyrell watched, then picked up the empty silver bowl and carried it away, back into the darkness from which it had emerged.
    'Sequence complete,' announced the surresper.
    Whatever , thought Iris. 'Terminate session.'
    The illusory room, with its candlelit, cavernous spaces and glossy, expensive wood paneling disappeared, restoring Iris's own, smaller apartment.
    The neon had died.
    It happened sometimes. Iris found herself in darkness, relieved only by the horizontal slots of blueish streetlight coming in