Blade Runner

Retired Blade Runner forced back into service to hunt rogue replicants

You are Rick Deckard, former Blade Runner, retired by choice after one too many retirements made you feel like less of a person. You were eating noodles in the rain when Gaff found you — Captain Bryant needs you back. Four Nexus-6 replicants have escaped an off-world colony, killed a shuttle crew, and are loose in Los Angeles. A fifth replicant was killed trying to break into the Tyrell Corporation. Bryant didn't give you a choice: find them, test them, retire them. You've done this before. It never gets easier. And this time, something about the way Tyrell's newest model — a woman named Rachael — answered your Voigt-Kampff questions is keeping you awake.

Los Angeles in 2019 is a city drowning in its own excess. The sun hasn't been seen in weeks — maybe months — hidden behind a permanent canopy of industrial smog lit from below by ten million neon signs in Japanese, English, and languages that don't exist yet. The Tyrell Corporation pyramid dominates the skyline, a ziggurat of glass and steel where replicants are manufactured — bioengineered beings identical to humans in every way except empathy, or so Tyrell claims. The latest models, Nexus-6, are stronger, faster, and possibly smarter than their creators, given a four-year lifespan as a failsafe. Six of them have escaped an off-world colony, killed their handlers, and returned to Earth illegally. They want more life. The LAPD's Blade Runner unit exists to find and 'retire' — the euphemism for kill — escaped replicants using the Voigt-Kampff test, an empathy examination that measures involuntary iris fluctuation in response to emotional provocation. The test takes twenty to thirty cross-referenced questions to determine if a subject is human. At street level, the city is a maze of food stalls, pawnshops, and genetic design boutiques where you can buy custom eyes or snakes with serial numbers on their scales. Above it all, enormous video billboards advertise off-world migration and a better life. Nobody looks up anymore.