Out of the Black - Lee Doty [19]
He picked up the driver's evidence bag and fished out the tablet. He used his own tablet to administer the warrant key, then copied out the data. A quick examination of the data showed that the decryption had worked. There was a sparse calendar, a few entries in the address book, two novels, and five videos. The novels were romances; filled with protagonists with long, thin fingers and creamy skin, no doubt. The movies were recent romantic comedies, with the only oldie, Blade Runner- The Director's Cut departing from that genre. On a whim, he pulled up the tablet's theater and checked the logs. The other movies had been recently leased and most had been watched, but Blade Runner had been watched about once a month since the tablet had been initially configured three years ago. He checked the file histories, which showed that the film had been in the initial transfer of data from Mr. Sieberg's previous tablet.
So it was an old and enduring favorite. The movie obsession felt like a clue. In fact, Ping would have been a lot more suspicious if he hadn't seen Blade Runner in the last year himself. Solid film, but only the director's cut was really worth watching more than twenty or thirty times. He had first been exposed to it in an ethics class in graduate school while training for his first career as a family counselor.
The movie takes place in a dark "future" (circa 2019... before Ping was born) where genetically engineered artificial people called Replicants are created to serve as soldiers and slaves. The story revolved around Deckard, a reluctant policeman who hunts rogue Replicants. In the movie, a ruthless band of three-year-old Replicants fought to find their creator in order to force him to give them more life than the four years written into their DNA. During the course of the investigation, Deckard falls in love with another Replicant who has been implanted with false memories and thinks she's human. The end of the director's cut was surprising in its implications.
In the class, the movie had been the basis for conversations on the nature of reality, about what happens when the assumptions on which we base our lives are ripped away. For Ping, the movie had been about alienation... about lost children. He couldn't help but feel for the Replicants. He smiled, remembering how at the time he'd wanted to help the poor doomed Replicants. Of course, it had turned out he wasn't so good at helping anyone.
"Too bad she won't live. But then agor who does?" echoed from his memory of the film like an accusation. Ping wondered how many other family counselors' careers had a body count. He realized just how bitter his smile had grown and did his best to pack it away- work to do. He moved on to the computer's address book.
***
Anne stumbled through the door and into the empty train station bathroom. She made it to one of the basins before a large wall-to-wall mirror. In the mirror, she examined the worst of her wounds... she was a mess. The cuts on her face weren't bleeding too badly, but her blue sweater was now a brown-clouded mess of rain-diluted blood. Her knees were still bleeding, and would probably bleed more when she pulled the glass out.
She dreaded looking at her neck, afraid of what she would find. She was afraid of how bad it was, but mostly she was afraid of how weird it might be. Her main barrier to investigating the wound on her throat was a surprising lack of faith in reality. She had witnessed some rather amazing things, and she knew that she should be thinking about stress and hysteria, about games her mind could have played, but she knew what she saw- okay, she had no idea what she saw, but she had seen it.
So, she stood, chin down, looking at the blood on the neckline of her sweater. Questions filled her mind. Was it going to be two neat holes like in the movies, or was it going to be a more realistic set of incisor-slashes? When was she going to start fading out of the mirror? Did she still have