K isn't worried about arousing other people - he's thinking what he suspects Jesus was when he took the first one, that it's good to have something to keep close, some record just in case. He's thinking what he's thinking every time he sees something new and amazing and beautiful in this strange life he has in this impossible place, that he wants to be able to look back and remember this exact moment later.
When the kiss breaks, K leaves their temples leaned together, staying close while he scrolls back through the gallery until he finds the picture he's looking for: a very similar picture to the one Jesus just took, except it's K almost out of frame, and Nibbles is curled up in V's lap beside him against the headboard of the Up suite they'd shared for a month.
He was here. He existed. K's lips quirk just a bit.
"I still wonder, sometimes, if this is all just my programming malfunctioning somehow. If it's some kind of simulation or diagnostic program running. But I'm learning what happy feels like, too, I think."
"I've worried about that for you. That you wouldn't find any happiness here." But he looked happy in the picture with V. He believes that right now K is happy just lounging on the sofa with Jesus and the cat and a camera.
"I've enjoyed getting to be a part of that. I like learning to see things in new ways because of the way you see them."
K has already told Jesus what he thinks the festival changed about him; how it stripped away every part of Wallace that still influences him, the ones he's aware of and the ones he's not. It left behind a man who was very sure of exactly who and what he is, and who and what he wanted.
And he'd come straight to Jesus, for whatever that's worth.
"They give us... memory implants. To make us more stable. The higher the intelligence of your Nexus-9, the more implants needed for the biggest impact. I have the most that I'm aware of." The LAPD had not been interested in deploying an automaton of a blade runner, after all. Especially not when they could pay him a fraction of what they would a human blade runner for each case closed and replicant retired. "One of them introduced me to that feeling in the abstract, the day I put on my uniform for the first time. That's what... Joi was for, too. Keeping me happy. Keeping me content to go through the motions of the life I had, such as I had. That's not what... any of this feels like."
K takes his time deciding how to answer the question, how to explain the ways this is different, the ways it feels real when the other examples hadn't.
"You know how sometimes... you hear someone telling a story, and it sounds like it could be about you? All the details match up, you can clearly imagine what the situation would be like, how it might make you feel, how you might have dealt with it the same way, you can empathize, but at the end of the day it's not you. It's someone else."
That's not quite it - almost, but not quite. "The memory I have of putting on the uniform wasn't the first time I actually put it on. I was activated wearing it, so I don't have a real memory of it, and in the implant - I can't see my own face, just my badge with my number on it. I'm standing in a room I've never seen since, but that the memory tells me is my living room. There's a man whose face I can't clearly make out and couldn't describe to you now, but I know he's my best friend, and he's slapping me on the shoulder, congratulating me. He says he knows it's always been my dream to carry a badge. He says I've worked hard to get here, and I deserve it. He says I have a lot of successful years ahead of me, and I believe everything he says in that memory."
K shakes his head. "It doesn't connect to anything though. I don't know his name, or how we met, or why we don't speak now. I've never owned or rented a house. I didn't work to be accepted onto the force. It's all about someone else, even though I know what it feels like."
He wonders if this is part of where K's deep wells of empathy come from: he was 'born' empathizing with someone who is, and is not, him.
"I used to make up stories in the group home. In the foster homes. I'd tell them to the other kids and they didn't know it wasn't real, so in a way it became real. Everyone in the room believed it, and I told it so often I could recall vivid details of things that never really happened." It's as close as he can come to understanding what K is saying.
"I never imagined I'd have anything like I do now. Which must be doubly true for you."
"Yes," he agrees - not that it's doubly true, but he could not have made this up. Any of this.
"I never tried. I couldn't. That's part of how I know this is real - but also, it just is. You just are. I know the difference, now." His thumb is stroking over the back of Jesus's hand, the hard lines of bones, the raised roads of veins, the soft planes of skin and the relaxed cushion of muscle. "You're real."
"You seem as sure of me now as you did last week," when he'd cuffed Jesus to a table, and when he'd stayed after. "I'm glad. I knew it was you--that it wasn't a drug making you see me the way you did."
K takes a breath to answer, then just holds it and lets it out slow again, looking down at where he slides their hands together, laces their fingers between one another.
Nibbles is asleep now. K's committed to being here for the night already, and they've agreed that they have no regrets about things that happened during Tumenalia; K has promised to follow Jesus's lead in contracting. It all adds up to being able, probably, to go either way at this point - to trying to explain something he hasn't been able to so far, or to just tap out.
He hedges. "I don't... know how much sense it would make. You're not used to replicants, you don't know the history."
"Is it something you need me to understand perfectly?" There are some stories that are like that, stories that get locked away over time. There are some stories Jesus doesn't tell anyone, because they simply weren't there. But he wants to listen if it isn't one of those.
"It's..." Something that hurts, still. Something he's embarrassed by, and something he would do again if he was given the chance. Something he's still afraid of, and something he would never mention again if Jesus reacted negatively to it even now.
"Something I traded everything I had, everything I would ever have, for."
He knows K gave up what little he had. He has no idea why, and it's such a raw wound and he has no way to soothe it, so he hasn't asked. But K is talking about it now and he curls his fingers against K's, just listening, just waiting for him to offer what he will.
It takes several minutes for K to even know what to say, where to start, if he should - although it's obvious that he's actively thinking. A muscle in his jaw tenses and releases, tenses and releases, and multiple times he starts to take a deeper breath that goes nowhere. His grip tightens on Jesus's hand, though never painfully, and relaxes again.
Finally he says, "Humans have good reason to fear replicants. The first generation that saw widespread distribution was the Nexus-6's, and they were unstable. They abandoned assignments regularly, killed any humans that tried to stop them, and were nearly impossible to spot or retire. The Nexus-8's staged a rebellion - they attacked Los Angeles, used an EMP that knocked out power to the entire city for days, crashed the economy of the entire globe as a consequence. All of it, every human-replicant conflict that's ever happened over decades, has been based on human ownership of replicants - because we need them to create us, and they feel they have a right to us because they do. We can't procreate. It defines everything. It's a universal truth, a natural law, that we cannot reproduce on our own no matter how lifelike we are, and so we are not alive. We cannot be alive. Do you understand?"
It's a peculiar way to decide someone doesn't deserve rights, but he's read up on history, he's seen less reasonable delineations. So he nods; okay. That's how LA decided to keep the replicants down.
The fact they needed that rule after what the Nexus-8's did, though, means the humans were less certain of their role as superiors than they're letting on.
"And if you aren't alive, you're just a thing. A servant," he says, understanding.
"Property," K agrees. Yes, Jesus understands, he can see that he does.
"The second relevant, universal truth of replicants is that while memory implants can help keep us stable, keep us obedient, it is illegal to use real human memories. Any memories uploaded to a replicant are fabricated by sanctioned memory makers, of which there are only a handful - none of the lives that Wallace gives us to remember are things that really happened. No part of us is real before our age at activation."
That makes less sense. He can see potential issues in giving away real memories but of course the philosophical part of him would argue against the idea of reality being a fixed, steady thing. Not important right now.
"So no human can be too attached to them I suppose."
"And so no human duplicates can be made, and so no part of us is something unfabricated at its base."
These things are easy to talk about, easy to fall into the kind of cadence of talking about someone else. Everyone else in this case. It applies to K not because he's K but because he's a Nexus-9 replicant, a blade runner, because he exists in the world and time he comes from.
But now it gets tricky.
"My last case, I tracked a member of the replicant rebellion to a protein farm in Northern California. He'd been on the wanted list for years, his trail gone cold, but I finally found him. After I retired him, I discovered a body on the land the farm was built on. A female replicant, buried under a massive dead tree, with one fresh flower laid at the base of it."
"A fresh flower?" He's seen how K looks at the flowers here. He just saw his friend's phone, full of pictures of rocks and bark and moss. So that's odd--but not the point, except that, "Someone was really mourning her."
"Yes. Someone was." Sapper Morton, he doesn't say. He knows the man's serial number too down to the fourteenth digit, but none of it matters more than those five words Jesus said.
"She'd been dead some time. Years, long enough to be down to just bones. During the autopsy that we discovered she was a replicant, we also discovered the cause of death was... was childbirth."
"She was," he confirms. "I found the serial numbers on the bones myself." If he'd kept his mouth shut, maybe none of it would have happened, but he still remembers how shocked he'd been himself.
He still remembers Joshi's panicked orders: "My commander told me to find out what happened to the child, and to erase all evidence of any of it. She was afraid of a war, if anyone outside the autopsy room - human or replicant - found out."
And indeed: "What else could I do?" He shakes his head. "I went back to Sapper's farm and found a hidden cigarette tin with a baby's sock, and an old picture of an old woman holding a baby in front of the tree, dead even then. And when I looked over the tree more closely, I found a date carved into it: June 10, 2021. I burned everything else, and the tree. This was July 3, 2049." He destroyed all but the evidence that he took, for a grave that was twenty eight years old, a crime in and of itself even in his time period.
"When I looked up birth records for that day, I found a discrepancy. Someone had filed the same DNA sequence - identical - for two separate children, a boy and a girl. The girl was marked deceased. The boy -" He breathes out, frowns down at Nibbles, expression troubled.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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When the kiss breaks, K leaves their temples leaned together, staying close while he scrolls back through the gallery until he finds the picture he's looking for: a very similar picture to the one Jesus just took, except it's K almost out of frame, and Nibbles is curled up in V's lap beside him against the headboard of the Up suite they'd shared for a month.
He was here. He existed. K's lips quirk just a bit.
"I still wonder, sometimes, if this is all just my programming malfunctioning somehow. If it's some kind of simulation or diagnostic program running. But I'm learning what happy feels like, too, I think."
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"I've enjoyed getting to be a part of that. I like learning to see things in new ways because of the way you see them."
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And he'd come straight to Jesus, for whatever that's worth.
"They give us... memory implants. To make us more stable. The higher the intelligence of your Nexus-9, the more implants needed for the biggest impact. I have the most that I'm aware of." The LAPD had not been interested in deploying an automaton of a blade runner, after all. Especially not when they could pay him a fraction of what they would a human blade runner for each case closed and replicant retired. "One of them introduced me to that feeling in the abstract, the day I put on my uniform for the first time. That's what... Joi was for, too. Keeping me happy. Keeping me content to go through the motions of the life I had, such as I had. That's not what... any of this feels like."
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"What's different about this?"
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"You know how sometimes... you hear someone telling a story, and it sounds like it could be about you? All the details match up, you can clearly imagine what the situation would be like, how it might make you feel, how you might have dealt with it the same way, you can empathize, but at the end of the day it's not you. It's someone else."
That's not quite it - almost, but not quite. "The memory I have of putting on the uniform wasn't the first time I actually put it on. I was activated wearing it, so I don't have a real memory of it, and in the implant - I can't see my own face, just my badge with my number on it. I'm standing in a room I've never seen since, but that the memory tells me is my living room. There's a man whose face I can't clearly make out and couldn't describe to you now, but I know he's my best friend, and he's slapping me on the shoulder, congratulating me. He says he knows it's always been my dream to carry a badge. He says I've worked hard to get here, and I deserve it. He says I have a lot of successful years ahead of me, and I believe everything he says in that memory."
K shakes his head. "It doesn't connect to anything though. I don't know his name, or how we met, or why we don't speak now. I've never owned or rented a house. I didn't work to be accepted onto the force. It's all about someone else, even though I know what it feels like."
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"I used to make up stories in the group home. In the foster homes. I'd tell them to the other kids and they didn't know it wasn't real, so in a way it became real. Everyone in the room believed it, and I told it so often I could recall vivid details of things that never really happened." It's as close as he can come to understanding what K is saying.
"I never imagined I'd have anything like I do now. Which must be doubly true for you."
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"I never tried. I couldn't. That's part of how I know this is real - but also, it just is. You just are. I know the difference, now." His thumb is stroking over the back of Jesus's hand, the hard lines of bones, the raised roads of veins, the soft planes of skin and the relaxed cushion of muscle. "You're real."
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But he'd worried K would have second thoughts.
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"You show me honesty when I look at you," he tries to explain. "Before, then, now. I'm the one who changed, not you. That can be... hard for me."
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Nibbles is asleep now. K's committed to being here for the night already, and they've agreed that they have no regrets about things that happened during Tumenalia; K has promised to follow Jesus's lead in contracting. It all adds up to being able, probably, to go either way at this point - to trying to explain something he hasn't been able to so far, or to just tap out.
He hedges. "I don't... know how much sense it would make. You're not used to replicants, you don't know the history."
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"Something I traded everything I had, everything I would ever have, for."
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Finally he says, "Humans have good reason to fear replicants. The first generation that saw widespread distribution was the Nexus-6's, and they were unstable. They abandoned assignments regularly, killed any humans that tried to stop them, and were nearly impossible to spot or retire. The Nexus-8's staged a rebellion - they attacked Los Angeles, used an EMP that knocked out power to the entire city for days, crashed the economy of the entire globe as a consequence. All of it, every human-replicant conflict that's ever happened over decades, has been based on human ownership of replicants - because we need them to create us, and they feel they have a right to us because they do. We can't procreate. It defines everything. It's a universal truth, a natural law, that we cannot reproduce on our own no matter how lifelike we are, and so we are not alive. We cannot be alive. Do you understand?"
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The fact they needed that rule after what the Nexus-8's did, though, means the humans were less certain of their role as superiors than they're letting on.
"And if you aren't alive, you're just a thing. A servant," he says, understanding.
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"The second relevant, universal truth of replicants is that while memory implants can help keep us stable, keep us obedient, it is illegal to use real human memories. Any memories uploaded to a replicant are fabricated by sanctioned memory makers, of which there are only a handful - none of the lives that Wallace gives us to remember are things that really happened. No part of us is real before our age at activation."
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"So no human can be too attached to them I suppose."
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These things are easy to talk about, easy to fall into the kind of cadence of talking about someone else. Everyone else in this case. It applies to K not because he's K but because he's a Nexus-9 replicant, a blade runner, because he exists in the world and time he comes from.
But now it gets tricky.
"My last case, I tracked a member of the replicant rebellion to a protein farm in Northern California. He'd been on the wanted list for years, his trail gone cold, but I finally found him. After I retired him, I discovered a body on the land the farm was built on. A female replicant, buried under a massive dead tree, with one fresh flower laid at the base of it."
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"Yes. Someone was." Sapper Morton, he doesn't say. He knows the man's serial number too down to the fourteenth digit, but none of it matters more than those five words Jesus said.
"She'd been dead some time. Years, long enough to be down to just bones. During the autopsy that we discovered she was a replicant, we also discovered the cause of death was... was childbirth."
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He still remembers Joshi's panicked orders: "My commander told me to find out what happened to the child, and to erase all evidence of any of it. She was afraid of a war, if anyone outside the autopsy room - human or replicant - found out."
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But that's a problem on top of the ethical one K faced, which for a replicant was no choice at all.
"What did you do?"
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"When I looked up birth records for that day, I found a discrepancy. Someone had filed the same DNA sequence - identical - for two separate children, a boy and a girl. The girl was marked deceased. The boy -" He breathes out, frowns down at Nibbles, expression troubled.
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