THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT Read online

  THE BLADE RUNNER

  AMENDMENT

  A Novel

  Paul Xylinides

  Smashwords edition. Copyright © Paul Xylinides 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.

  ISBN-13: 978-1511556477

  ISBN-10: 1511556471

  PaulXylinides.com

  Cover by: Dayna Barley-Cohrs

  PROLOGUE

  Against all odds the argument had been won, at least within democratic constraints. By referendum, human evolution was decided to be an ongoing spiritual and not a purely biological event, and in the United States of America, the law recognized this determination.

  Rare is the occasion that the Constitution of the United States of America is found insufficient such that it need be altered or added to in order better to reflect and guide the interests and future decisions of the country’s citizens as they find themselves having to choose one path over another in the hope and sincere belief that the one they decide upon will preserve not only their inalienable freedoms but also the very existence of what makes these freedoms possible, that being, the people themselves as endowed by their Creator and the rule of law. It would be remiss not to acknowledge the guilt factor as contributive although the erasure of France from the face of the earth immediately and thereafter was deemed to be an instance of “macro-misadventure” not to be taken personally by anyone. To cite directly the amendment – as introduced by the Republican Party and unanimously supported by its political counterparts – also known as the Blade Runner Amendment:

  In recognition of the law of unforeseen consequences, no self-sustaining entity of a human character or alterations and modifications to such character may be produced from synthesized genetic material of whatever extraction and/or recombination, be it in human or other form. This provision is understood to be one of national interest and security and to be subject to all necessary state and legal sanctions to be so preserved.

  Sizeable support came from the military and security forces of the country unwilling as they were to shoulder an added and seemingly insupportable burden of having to police beings with alien capacities as foreshadowed under the nomenclature of ‘replicants’ in the 1980’s film Blade Runner. The commercial interest and benefit of the amendment – keeping in mind the extensive lobbying efforts on the part of the relevant industries – was to respond to perceived or manufactured demand for humanoids to serve human needs.

  1

  His New York Garden

  That morning, in his New York garden, Virgil had Molly serve him the ‘usual’ light breakfast – poached eggs, whole grain toast, wedges of orange, and, to finish, black coffee. While he ate, he conversed with his well-worn and dependable humanoid as within the calm eye of a storm, for his garden walls – a further bulwark between 42nd and 43rd Streets – sufficiently transmuted the city’s rumble into whatever imagined landscape suited at the time. His oak tree – as Virgil possessively termed it – alone preserved its silence that it shed in a constant fall out of the branches’ cloud of leaves and, as well, from the deep umbers interlacing above him with an order that the eye of man easily intuits. Whatever paradigm instructed this natural entity – if accidental design, so be it – worked. The broad trunk drew its silence from deep within the earth. The gargantuan knuckles of its spreading roots determined the placement of the weathered, slat-topped wood table where Virgil and Molly sat. Both human and humanoid registered the garden’s brick wall grimed with evening tones partially vine-emblazoned. Virgil bent over his immaculately presented breakfast and, like his tree, absorbed the moment.

  Although the name he had given Molly always pleased him with its sound and its literary connotations, it caused him to be keenly aware that his own – Virgil Woolf – could never live up to the great Virginia. His moniker’s pronouncement would inevitably call her memory to mind and sometimes to another’s cultured thoughts. Should reference be made, he never tired of elaborating upon her genius and he would on occasion also presume to expound upon what he regarded as her grand failures. Most often his interlocutor had little awareness of what he spoke.

  To think upon how the authoress ended always broke his heart. He himself had pilgrimaged to the incoming tide of the English Channel when it turbulently backed up the innocent threading of the River Ouse through the nibbled green Downs of East Sussex that were Virginia’s stamping ground. It must have been at one of these regular times that she took her decision and all to her own design filled her coat pockets with pebbles. One, one single opening of that swan-like throat made a satin meal of death. In her work, Virgil found all the reasons he needed to live and, in the company of such as Molly, his own deepest irony when he considered Virginia Woolf’s circle of acquaintance.

  “Give me a moment, Virgil!”

  The intonation of the familiar request charmed him: once selected, he had been satisfied, always had gone back to it after brief experimentations. Water must make this sound when rolling over rocks buried in a stream, or was it the bruised outcry of fruit after being dropped? No. – He must, “Try again. Fail better.” – Still, a Rimbaud poet (“a – red, e – white, i – blue – the colour of vowels” or a synaesthetic construction similar to that) might understand.

  Molly was an older model. The thought weighed on him lightly – she had served him well both as the familiar of his little household and as a tool for the play of his mind. She continued to test his capacities. Also, and not negligible for his sense of well-being, she kept him from the worst excesses of biological self-indulgence and consequent self-loathing were he to become immersed in the charms of newer and newer editions. He resisted an upgrade. Her classic look of ten years past – deeply shadowed eyes, fleshy lips – continued in her favour. She had emerged from an oasis of taste as the period of first ripening often is for human endeavour. That ‘look what we can achieve’ moment had combined with ‘let’s make sure it won’t fall apart’.

  She never failed to appeal and, despite the passage of time, he had not yet plumbed her depths. This morning’s choice of a lavender track-suit made for a comfortable presence, and the moments she took to recharge, although somewhat frequent of late with head slumped forward or back as she sat in the sun or under the lamp, were not without a certain feline charm. Her mouth did not fall open as is the manner of humans. Dark, Italian-sourced hair framed her face. The eyes and lips would have acquired a moist look when she was done. Sometimes his fingers would reach out and trace the lines of her ears as they might those of some fine shell. When she massaged his feet, it was a pleasure to imagine her own in his hand although with actual touch she became less a thing of the mind and the sensual illusion degraded. She had been made, she was there for him, and she worked was his abiding attitude. They had a relationship. Unlike most humans, she could hold a conversation and, in that idyllic voice of hers, take up his lead whatever the subject. She had his profile so that he could tell her ‘the usual’ and he could depend on her understanding what he meant for the occasion and, as importantly, he had hers. The extensive information they had on each other amounted to knowledge.

  “Molly, those leaves above us – massed and fluttering – remind me of Phoenician ships as they might appear tossing about in flotillas on the open sea.”

  Her eyes opened and showed a dewy brightness. The conversation could now begin.

  “Those ships of ancient Phoenicia,” she responded to t
his artful opener – a mere image – that he’d dangled between them, “were made by hand – and so had a naturalness not dissimilar to these leaves – far in the past B.C., of cedar planks, a good material to use against rot, that fitted together by means of mortises whose design resisted the movement of cargo and the pressure from bodies of water in the worst storms of the Mediterranean Sea. The vessels were impervious to splitting apart under any of these kinds of conditions. Curved at the belly and capacious in consequence, they were suitable for trading and, as you might conclude from the upswept prow topped by a carved horse’s head and the equally demonstrative stern, were elegant to the eye.”

  “Cedar planks,” he murmured.

  He relished her syntax. It could be more fluid, but then so could his that continued to serve as her model and followed his thought. All it took now was a verbal prod and he luxuriated in the expectation of what it might call forth, not to speak of his sense of mastery – itself still a work in progress.

  “Yes, the wood is indigenous to the land of the Phoenicians, known, in later Biblical times, as Lebanon.”

  The Biblical context had no appeal for him so early in the day – he could face its threats and rewards to his soul more equably it seemed with the prospect of bedtime in view. He ignored it and, instead, asked a simple question in order to pursue further the course they were already on.

  “To what parts did they sail?”

  “All over the known world. Such cities as Sparta, Athens, and Carthage served for their ports of call, and they would voyage further to the Atlantic coastal cities of present-day Portugal. The vessels’ sea-worthiness made them capable of crossing the ocean; however, no proof exists for such an accomplishment.”

  “Some must have sailed in that direction,” he mused. “Who wouldn’t make the attempt given the lures of that vastness and the rewards of solving its mysteries? And what did their women look like – the women of Phoenicia?” He wanted to bring the conversation to a close with a boost to his day, why not?

  “The extant, much deteriorated portraits show eyes that were large and insectan; the women grew their black curly hair in wiry fashion, like Shakespeare’s mistress, to below the shoulders.” Her programme to make literary allusions worked just fine, he noted. “They were thin-boned and with a tendency to a double chin; they favoured ornamental but not ostentatious touches on their attire. Would you like me to go into detail?”

  “No, please don’t. All in all not very appealing as is not uncommon with the portraiture of the privileged.” He undertook and enjoyed holding up his end of the conversation. “They never seem to know what to do with their resources and appetites. You can only wonder what those over-sized eyes were all about – doubtless the painter was compensating for the show of fat with self-congratulation and pride for their status and wealth. Were their men faithful to them?” What kind of a response would Molly make to the generalized thrust of his question?

  He wasn’t surprised when she said, “I don’t understand your intention.” Pleased, in fact, at the human quality of the response and the chance for him to instruct. They were working together, it felt.

  “Recall your Shakespeare reference, Molly! Did they have mistresses, that sort of thing? How did they conduct themselves when away from their double-chinned wives?”

  “If you mean with other women, Phoenician men were no different from those in other countries. They resorted to prostitutes. Only, in Phoenicia, some of these prostitutes also functioned as priestesses and, in the case of male prostitutes, priests.”

  “Really!”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that work?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Are not the two occupations – prostitute and priestess – contradictory?”

  “Yes they are, mostly that is, in present times. This aspect of culture no longer exists other than in some cults and, in deviant and confused form it may be supposed in the Catholic Church with so-called celibate priests – mostly a pretence.” Here, she appeared to become puzzled as if dealing with too much murky and complex information, but she ploughed through these waters. “In their past manifestation, to answer your question, these dual roles signified that the act of union between humans, whether male and female, or male and male, simulated the oneness of deity and established a connection, temporary and renewable, between the human and the divine.”

  “You said they were prostitutes.”

  “An exchange of money or goods took place and certain duplicities or delusions arose with prostitutes claiming to be priests or priestesses and so expanding their market or possibly fully believing themselves to represent the theology of the time; while the latter, unmistakably authentic personages offered the same services as did prostitutes but without the direct material reward.”

  “I see.”

  “Is there anything else, Virgil?”

  “No, thank you, Molly.”

  Without having to be asked, his casually dressed humanoid proceeded with a measure of grace to collect and take away the breakfast things, leaving Virgil to ruminate beneath his silence-drenched oak leaves.

  2

  The Staircase

  Here he was, salacious on a staircase – so much for the fruits of self-discipline. Perhaps it was just too easy to practice restraint in the context of the familiar Molly, whereas this curvaceous street model, backed against a refrigerator, provoked. The beefy moving men with tattoos on their arms – as he noticed in conjunction with the slabs of their faces – were manhandling it up or down he couldn’t tell, for they appeared either stuck or resting – some workers chose the oddest places and times to break off. The flowers in his hand he bore effetely before him – alien to his fellow men with a fridge to the belly – intended for his grandmother, that is, the flowers not, he presumed, the fridge, although what did he know of destinations at this moment? She ailed with the years in her one-room walk-up on the top floor of this brownstone nest that was lasting romantically forever for the rats and was a stop-off for those persons who no longer have any apparent use beyond sentimental value with their predestined fate in sight.

  In contrast to their deteriorating shelters, however, these individuals do want to go on; and so Virgil eased past the obtrusions with a civil nod to the flesh and lard transporters that met with a greater paralysis in the already unforthcoming features – they couldn’t identify with such a being as he, these devolved sons of Hercules. The flowers crushed for a moment against the rent model’s chest, she, of course, meriting no acknowledgment as he bore away his own aroused stamen in addition to the wilting cadeau.

  “Drooping posy, rearrange itself!” he mouthed in addition to his shake.

  He retained the instant of their eyes meeting above the blindly disconsolate, meadow-lovely flowers, hers an absorbing classic blue that recorded his focused look. He might have ignored her had not those men been inches away with their emasculating sweat smears – not that he cared a fig, having done his time, they stuck in theirs and a completely different city about them than they imagined from their living rooms. No matter. She would have no opinions other than commercial on the subject of his inquiring look, certainly not palpitating sentience as she added and placed him on the list of her priorities.

  He had edged past a final visual of the moving-men’s porcine noses. Cousins or brothers, their possessors must be, denizens of the same block, the same neighbourhood, definitely the same gene pool, their great-great grandfathers arrived on the same vomit-full, rat-soup ship. They were the social issue of horizontal mobility. Still not rare to see such specimens what with heavy appliances requiring delivery.

  Her look – the product of many minds and many porn stars – remained with him.

  At the top of the staircase, holding on to a railing like a dinosaur’s bone, he paused, took a breath of the wall-exhaled air that included the output of what crawled beneath, and he stared at the stubbornly clinging plaster, the cracks, the separation of
mouldings, the meandering flat surfaces. Leakages hidden for decades within the structural confines had caused ecosystems sufficient unto themselves to come into existence complete with microflora and centipede-like creatures that couldn’t survive elsewhere. Before he made a move to the door he recalled its surface: a patina of disease.

  Of what is that humanoid thinking? Dimly the question looked to come to his rescue, but he knocked, didn’t wait, and tried the handle. In he went, transitioning – momentary Kafka metamorphosis – clutching his flowers and smiling subterfuge.

  Nothing, of course. Is she thinking. It is with that thought we approach each other.

  He was of two minds as to his gran’ mama’s habits – this unlocked door. The city was passive – not pacified – but didn’t they carry cash in these neighbourhoods still? He couldn’t decide whether it was her trusting nature or golden-age obstinacy. She was going to live in the world that she wanted and so be it if it collided with another! He wouldn’t engage her on the subject again. Not to hear her answer: ‘the world is what you make it’. Fair enough. Something to live by. Difficult to refute as far as it went and impossible when backed by willingness to bear the consequences.

  The old were stubborn, unable to adjust and adjust again while they fabricate their positions out of whole cloth. Their tents easily blow away and, when the first pegs come loose, howling ensues. Nonetheless, left to the open weather, the old survive awhile at least, and their sheer stubbornness morphs into self-congratulatory pride as the wind and the sun and the rain beat against them. At some point, all become Lears on the heath, trust betrayed, aware of their own betrayals. He was running away with himself before the question of her unlocked door and his guilt that he didn’t do more that made little sense such as carry her off and swaddle her with care.