Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Chapter 19

Looking down, Jung Hoseok saw his own hands; they gripped the twin handles of the empathy box. As he stood gaping at them, the lights in the living room of his apartment plunged out. He could see, in the kitchen, Yoongi hurrying to catch the table lamp there.
"Listen, Hoseok," Baekhyun whispered harshly in his ear; he had grabbed him by the shoulder, his nails digging into him with frantic intensity. He seemed unaware of what he did, now; in
the dim nocturnal light from outdoors Baekhyun's face had become distorted, astigmatic. It had turned into — a craven dish, with cowering, tiny, lidless eyes.
"You have to go," he whispered, "to the door, when he knocks, if he does knock; you have to show him your identification and tell him this is your apartment and no one else is here. And you ask to see
a warrant."
Yoongi, standing on the other side of him, his body arched, whispered, "Don't let him in, Hoseok.
Say anything; do anything that will stop him. Do you know what a bounty hunter would do let loose in here? Do you understand what he would do to us? "
Moving away from the two android males Hoseok groped his way to the door; with his fingers he located the knob, halted there, listening. He could sense the hall outside, is he always had sensed it: vacant and reverberating and lifeless.
"Hear anything?" Chanyeok said, bending close. Hoseok smelled the rank, cringing body; he inhaled fear from it, fear pouring out, forming a mist. "Step out and take a look."
Opening the door, Hoseok looked up and down the indistinct hall. The air out here had a clear quality, despite the weight of dust. He still held the spider which Mercer had given him.
Was it actually the spider which Yoongi had snipped apart with Baekhyun's cuticle scissors?
Probably not. He would never know. But anyhow it was alive; it crept about within his closed hand, not biting him: as with most small spiders its mandibles could not puncture human
skin.
He reached the end of the hall, descended the stairs, and stepped outside, onto what had once been a terraced path, garden-enclosed. The garden had perished during the war and
the path had ruptured in a thousand places. But he knew its surface; under his feet the
familiar path felt good, and he followed it, passed along the greater side of the building, coming at last to the only verdant spot in the vicinity — a yard-square patch of dust- saturated, drooping weeds. There he deposited the spider. He experienced its wavering progress as it departed his hand. Well, that was that; he straightened up.
A flashlight beam focused on the weeds; in its glare their half-dead stalks appeared stark, menacing. Now he could see the spider; it rested on a serrated leaf. So it had gotten away all right.
"What did you do?" the man holding the flashlight asked.
"I put down a spider," he said, wondering why the man didn't see; in the beam of yellow light the spider bloated up larger than life. "So it could get away."
"Why don't you take it up to your apartment? You ought to keep it in a jar. According to the January Sidney's most spiders are up ten percent in retail price. You could have gotten a
hundred and some odd dollars for it."
Hoseok said, "If I took it back up there he'd cut it apart again. Bit by bit, to see what it did."
"Androids do that," the man said. Reaching into his overcoat he brought out something which he flapped open and extended toward Hoseok.
In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face
and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. Methodical but informal.
Not demi-god in shape; not at all as Hosekk had anticipated him.
"I'm an investigator for the San Francisco Police Department. Jeon, Jeon Jungkook."
The man flapped his ID shut again, stuck it back in his overcoat pocket. "They're up there now? The three?"
"Well, the thing is," Hoseok said, "I'm looking after them. Two are nice. They're the last ones of the group; the rest are dead. I brought Yoongi's TV set up from his apartment and put it
in mine, so they could watch Buster Friendly. Buster proved beyond a doubt that Mercer doesn't exist." Hoseok felt excitement, knowing something of this importance — news that the
bounty hunter evidently hadn't heard.
"Let's go up there," Jeon said. Suddenly he held a laser tube pointed at Hoseok; then, indecisively, he put it away. "You're a special, aren't you," he said. "A chickenhead."
"But I have a job. I drive a truck for — " Horrified, he discovered he had forgotten the name. " — a pet hospital," he said. "The Van Ness Pet Hospital," he said. "Owned b-b-by Hannibal Sloat."
Jeon said, "Will you take me up there and show me which apartment they're in?
There're over a thousand separate apartments; you can save me a lot of time." His voice dipped with fatigue.
"If you kill them you won't be able to fuse with Mercer again," Hoseok said.
"You won't take me up there? Show me which floor? Just tell me the floor. I'll figure out which apartment on the floor it is."
"No," Hoseok said.
"Under state and federal law," Jeon began. He ceased, then. Giving up the interrogation. "Good night," he said, and walked away, up the path and into the building, his flashlight bleeding a yellowed, diffuse path before him.
Inside the conapt building, Jeon Jungkook shut off his flashlight; guided by the ineffectual, recessed bulbs spaced ahead of him he made his way along the hall, thinking, The chicken- head knows they're androids; he knew it already, before I told him. But he doesn't understand. On the other hand, who does? Do I? Did I? And one of them will be a duplicate of Taehyun, he reflected. Maybe the special has been living with him. I wonder how he liked it, he asked himself. Maybe that was the one who he believed would cut up his spider. I could go back and get that spider, he reflected. I've never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it'll happen someday to me like it did him.
He had brought listening gear from his car; he set it up, now, a revolving detek-snout with blip screen. In the silence of the hall the screen indicated nothing. Not on this floor, he said to himself. He clicked over to vertical. On that axis the snout absorbed a faint signal. Upstairs.
He gathered up the gear and his briefcase and climbed the stairs to the next floor.
A figure in the shadows waited.
"If you move I'll retire you," Jungkook said. One of the male one's, waiting for him. In his clenched fingers the laser tube felt hard but he could not lift it and aim it. He had been caught first, caught too
soon.
"I'm not an android," the figure said. "My name is Mercer." It stepped into a zone of light. "I inhabit this building because of Mr. Hoseok. The special who had the spider; you talked briefly to him outside."
"Am I outside Mercerism, now?" Jungkook said. "As the chickenhead said? Because of what I'm going to do in the next few minutes?"
Mercer said, "Mr. Hoseok spoke for himself, not for me. What you are doing has to be done. I said that already." Raising his arm he pointed at the stairs behind Jungkook. "I came to tell you that one of them is behind you and below, not in the apartment. It will be the hard one of the three and you must retire it first." The rustling, ancient voice gained abrupt fervor. "Quick, Mr. Jeon. On the steps."
His laser tube thrust out, Jungkook spun and sank onto his haunches facing the flight of stairs.
Up it glided a man, toward him, and he knew him; he recognized him and lowered his laser tube.
"Taehyung" he said, perplexed. Had he followed him in his own hovercar, tracked him here? And why?
"Go back to Seattle," he said. "Leave me alone; Mercer told me I've got to do it." And then he saw that it was not quite Taehyung.
"For what we've meant to each other," the android said as it approached him, its arms reaching as if to clutch at him. The clothes, he thought, are wrong. But the eyes, the same eyes. And there are more like this; there can be a legion of him, each with its own name, but all Kim Taehyung — Taehyung, the prototype, used by the manufacturer to protect the others.
He fired at him as, imploringly, he dashed toward him. The android burst and parts of it flew; he covered his face and then looked again, looked and saw the laser tube which it had
carried roll away, back onto the stairs; the metal tube bounced downward, step by step, the sound echoing and diminishing and slowing. The hard one of the three, Mercer had said. He peered about, searching for Mercer. The old man had gone. They can follow me with Kim Taehyung's until I die, he thought, or until the type becomes obsolete, whichever comes first. And now the other two, he thought. One of them is not in the apartment, Mercer had
said. Mercer protected me, he realized. Manifested himself and offered aid. He — it — would have gotten me, he said to himself, except for the fact that Mercer warned me. I can do the rest, now, he realized. This was the impossible one; he knew I couldn't do this. But it's over. In an instant. I did what I couldn't do. The others I can track by standard procedure; they will be hard but they won't be like this.
He stood alone in the empty hall; Mercer had left him because he had done what he came for, Taehyung — or rather Min Yoongi — had been dismembered and that left nothing now, only himself. But elsewhere in the building; the others waited and knew. Perceived what he had done, here. Probably, at this point, they were afraid. This had been their response to his presence in the building. Their attempt. Without Mercer it would have worked. For them, winter had come.
This has to be done quickly, what I'm after now, he realized; he hurried down the hall and all at once his detection gear registered the presence of cephalic activity. He had found their apartment. No more need of the gear; he discarded it and rapped on the apartment door.
From within, a man's voice sounded. "Who is it?"
"This is Mr. Hoseok," Jungkook said. "Let me in because I'm looking after you and t-t-two of you are nice boy's."
"We're not opening the door," a boy's voice came.
"I want to watch Buster Friendly on Yoongi's TV set," Jungkook said. "Now that he's proved Mercer doesn't exist it's very important to watch him. I drive a truck for the Van Ness Pet Hospital,which is owned by Mr. Hannibal S-s-sloat." He made himself stammer. "S-s-so would you open the d-d-door? It's my apartment." He waited, and the door opened. Within the
apartment he saw darkness and indistinct shapes, two of them.
The smaller shape, the boy, said, "You have to administer tests."
"It's too late," Jungkook said. The taller figure tried to push the door shut and turn on some variety of electronic equipment.
"No," Jungkook said, "I have to come in." He let Chanyeol fire
once; he held his own fire until the laser beam had passed by him as he twisted out of the way.
"You've lost your legal basis," Jungkook said, "by firing on me. You should have forced me to give you the Voigt-Kampff test. But now it doesn't matter." Once more Chanyeol sent a laser beam cutting at him, missed, dropped the tube, and ran somewhere deeper inside the apartment, to another room, perhaps, the electronic hardware abandoned.
"Why didn't Yoongi get you?" Baekhyun said.
"There is no Yoongi," he said. "Only Kim Taehyung, over and over again."
He saw the laser tube in his dimly outlined hand; Chanyeol had slipped it to him, had meant to decoy him into the apartment, far in, so that Baekhyun could get him from behind, in the back.
"I'm sorry, Beakhyun," Jungkook said, and shot him.
Chanyeol, in the other room, let out a cry of anguish.
"Okay, you loved her," Jungkook said. "And I loved Taehyung. And the special loved the other Taehyung." He shot Chanyeol; the big man's corpse lashed about, toppled like an overstacked
collection of separate, brittle entities; it smashed into the kitchen table and carried dishes and flatware down with it. Reflex circuits in the corpse made it twitch and flutter, but it had died; Jungkook ignored it, not seeing it and not seeing that of Baekhyun by the front door. I got the last one, Jungkook realized. Six today; almost a record. And now it's over and I can go home, back to Jimin and the goat. And we'll have enough money, for once.
He sat down on the couch and presently as he sat there in the silence of the apartment,
among the nonstirring objects, the special Mr. Hoseok appeared at the door.
"Better not look," Jungkook said.
"I saw him on the stairs. Yoongi." The special was crying.
"Don't take it so hard," Jungkook said. He got dizzily to his feet, laboring. "Where's your phone?"
The special said nothing, did nothing except stand. So Jungkook hunted for the phone himself, found it, and dialed Harry Bryant's office.