"Bladerunner 03 - Replicant Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

"Now what?" The close-up on the fake Rachael showed her dropping out of character, the look of shock on her face transmuted to that of a disgusted professional as she let the heavy gun hang at the end of her arm. She sighed wearily. "Christ, this shoot's taking forever."
Deckard ignored her, striding past the cameras on their automated tracking booms, the skeletal apparatuses of light and event. The drizzle from the overhead rain gantry ran off his jacket sleeves, the grid underneath the soundstage sucking away the excess from the glossily photogenic puddles. He pushed aside the faux Deckard, the actor playing him, and stood looking down at Kowalski. At what was left of the replicant, the bleeding artificial flesh.
"Please A hand clutched ineffectually at his elbow. "Mr. Deckard ... you can't just-"
He turned angrily upon the production assistant, a tiny androgynous figure with heavy retro black-framed glasses. "It wasn't supposed to happen this way!" He jabbed his finger at the assistant, who fended it off with an upraised clipboard. "I was told you weren't going to kill anyone!" The circumference of his gaze tinged with red as he looked back toward the crew ringing the soundstage. "Where's Urbenton?"
That was the name of the director. Who was conspicuously missing, the folding chair that had usually supported his pudgy frame now unoccupied. Chickenshit sonuva bitch- Deckard felt his teeth grinding together. The director must've snuck out after the video recorders had started rolling, while Deckard had been wrapped in the view from the cam monitors, watching the re-creation of his own past. Urbenton would've known that Deckard would go ballistic when a real bullet, from a real gun, wound up churning through someone's brain.
"Come on, man The actor playing him-not a replicant like the one who had been playing Kowalski, but an actual human-tried out as peacemaker. "It can't all be special effects, you know. Sometimes you gotta go for realism."
"Get away from me." Revulsion worked its way up Deckard's throat, choking him as though the replicant's big hands had been around his own neck instead of the other
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man's. The actor didn't even look that much like him, or at least not yet. Like most of the talent in the video industry, in addition to the remote cam implanted behind one eye, the actor also had barely visible tracker dots sewn under his skin, so that in postproduction another's face could be ceegeed over the one he'd been born with.
That new face would've been the real Deckard's. But not now, he fumed. Not if I can help it. "So where is he?" Deckard stopped just short of gathering up the front of the assistant's collar in his hand and squeezing tight, the way the dead Kowalski had done to the human actor. "Where's Urbenton?"
"I ... I don't know The assistant retreated, sweating hands clasped to the clipboard. "He got called away .
"Yeah, right. I bet." Deckard stepped over the corpse and started toward the soundstage's big rolling doors and the interlocking corridors and spaces of the studio complex beyond. "I'll find him myself. He's got one hell of a lot of explaining to do."
He didn't look over his shoulder as he strode away. But he could sense the fake L.A. dying its own death, the constant artificial rain stopping, the vehicles halting and being shut off in the middle of the crowded street, the actors and extras walking off the set. The replica blimp, a tenth the size of the one that had once actually floated above the city, dangled inert from the overhead rigging, adscreen blank and faceless.
The city's walls parted as the grips moved the scenery back. There was nothing behind them except dust and stubbed-out cigarettes, and a few scattered drops of blood.
A silver crescent in the sky, hanging below him. Dave Holden thought it looked like some kind of Islamic emblem, complete to the glittering star between the points of its horns. The artificial moon's gravitational field tilted the skiff's gimballed pilot's seat, hanging him upside down inside the tiny interplanetary craft. Inside the cramped cockpit area, there was barely room enough for himself and the cargo strapped onto the empty seat beside him.
Which spoke now: "You're in big trouble, pal." The briefcase kept its voice level and calm, as though unconcerned with human problems.
Holden glanced over at the briefcase. Plain black, a decent grade of leatherette, chrome snaps and bits around the handle. It looked like the exact sort that millions of junior execs carried into office towers every morning, back on Earth. By rights, it shouldn't have been talking at all; that it was doing so indicated the long-standing personal relationship between the two of them.
"Big, big trouble." The briefcase continued its simple, ominous pronouncements.
"I know-" Holden reached out to the control panel and dialed the skiff's guidance system toward the silver crescent's intake beam. "I breathe trouble." More than metaphor:
the lungs in his chest, and the heart between them, were efficient constructs of Teflon and surgical steel. His original cardiopulmonary system had been blown out his back by an escaped replicant named Leon Kowalski. Back on Earth, back in the L.A. from which he and the briefcase had just flown. That bullet had been a couple of years ago; there had been others before and since then, some of which he'd fired, others that'd been fired at him. The bio-mechanical lungs sucked whiffs of imminent death and left them on his tongue. Tasting like the ashes of the cigarettes the LAPD doctors had made him give up. "Breathe it out, too."
"You're probably going to die."
"Coming from you, that's good." Holden knew that the briefcase's voice was the voice of the dead. A dead man speaking. It didn't matter whether that man, when alive, had been human or not. "You'd know, wouldn't you?"
If the briefcase had had shoulders, it would've shrugged. "Just leveling with you. That's all."
Holden ignored the last bit. Lights had started flashing on the control panel, indicating that the intake beam had locked onto the skiff. One light, he knew, would stay yellow for a few more seconds; that was the window of opportunity for abandoning the intake approach, for breaking off and turning the little craft around. And heading back to Earth or anywhere else his own death didn't seem quite so probable.
He kept his hands folded in his lap, watching and waiting until the yellow light disappeared, replaced by the green one right next to it. They were going in.
The silver crescent loomed bigger and brighter in the skiff's viewscreen. He could make out the segmented panels that formed its curved, double-tapered shape. Croissant, thought Holden. Thinking of French bakery goods, stuff served with real coffee. The same word, actually. He knew his mind was rattling on, filling up the empty corridors in-
side his head with nonsense. So there wouldn't be room for worrying about the job he'd come all this way to Outer Hollywood to do.
A delivery job. Once I was a blade runner, he mused; now I'm some sort of errand boy. He didn't mind; he'd kept his gun when he'd quit the police department. That was the main thing: he needed it now more than before.
The silver crescent grew larger, blocking out the pocked white shape of the real moon. Brown-mottled Earth lay somewhere behind the skiff; Holden didn't sweat the navigational fine points. Those had all been programmed in, along with the other details of the job. He glanced again at the briefcase, which had mercifully fallen silent. The initials on the small brass plaque under the handle read RMD. Not his, but those of the person to whom the briefcase was to be delivered. Then he can deal with it, thought Holden. He wondered if Mreally was Rick Deckard's middle initial, or whether that was just something that the people who'd put the briefcase together had made up out of thin air.
Outer Hollywood filled the screen now; the intake beam had brought the skiff around to the landing bays on the curve's fat convex side. There'd been a single bright flash, the viewscreen's pixels max'd out, when the skiff had passed through the focussed reflection from the bank of mirrors that served as the crescent's attached star. Holden had caught a glimpse of the massive struts and triangulated framework that held the mirror bank between the station's horns. The open steel girders looked rusted-In a vacuum? he wondered; that's weird-and warped from neglect. Cables drifted loose like beheaded snakes; the motors and other servo-mechanisms that served to adjust the mirrors' angles and catch the unfiltered radiation from the sun, looked barely functional. Light bounced off some of the mirrors and out like idiot semaphores into space, instead of illuminating the soundstages behind Outer Hollywood's pressure-sealed windows. Holden figured that'd be all right if only night scenes were being taped . . . or scenes of L.A. during the rainy season. Anything cheerful enough to require an approximation of daylight, and they'd all be out of luck.
The briefcase spoke up again. "You strapped?"
For a moment, Holden thought the briefcase was referring to the pilot seat's restraints, then realized it had slipped into the urban patois it sometimes affected. He patted the holstered weapon inside his camel's-hair jacket. "Of course." The gun felt like a rock above one of his artificial lungs.
"We'd be better off if it was me carrying you." A fretful note sounded in the briefcase's voice.
He couldn't understand the briefcase's self-absorbed concern. The bastard's already dead, he thought. How could things get any worse for it? For himself, though . . . that was another matter.
"Welcome to our faciliteezz." A canned female presence, bodiless and somewhere above his head, started talking as soon as Holden climbed out of the skiff's cockpit. "For all your video production needzz Something was wrong with the hidden p.a. speakers; the woman's sibilants came out as an insectoid hiss. "Zztock and cuzztom zzets .
fully furnizzhed editing zzuites . . . all at a competitive rate. Why go elzzewhere?"