"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.
He could explain, if he knew; it might occur to him to try, if his mind weren't somewhere else entirely right now, a different world and a different time and a different city. A different life, technically, since he's sure he didn't survive there. Not unless indeed this is a simulation of some kind, which isn't out of the realm of possibility, but he thinks he'd know.
He had known then, after all. As best as he could, he knew, once he knew it was a possibility. He catches Nibbles' paw and massages the pad of his foot, then rubs his ears wordlessly, feeling the warmth and weight of Jesus's hand on his and thinking he doesn't want to keep going. He doesn't want to connect the dots he's thrown out for consideration.
He swallows, continues in a voice so low it's almost mumbling, except even now he enunciates clearly enough to be understood. "My earliest memory is in an orphanage. I don't remember who dropped me off there or why, too young probably, or I always assumed it simply wasn't part of the memory. Instead it's... about a toy I had. A carved horse figurine. Other kids in the orphanage wanted it, but it was all I had, so I ran with it. I hid it. I tried to convince them I'd burned it in the furnace, but they didn't believe me, and there were more of them than me."
It probably wouldn't have mattered even if they had found the horse. He would have been beaten for trying to hide it. Hell, Jesus sometimes got hit even when he handed his things over. It's part of what had made him decide to learn to fight back: if he was going to get hit no matter what he did he wanted to hit back.
But that's not K, who takes the beating. Even now.
"I thought they gave you memories to make you stable." Nothing about growing up in an orphanage makes a person more stable.
"Not that kind of stable," K admits, shaking his head.
"It's to avoid there being nothing at all. No connection to anything, no loyalty to anyone but ourselves. I always assumed they chose that memory to make me grateful for what I have now, or to make me want to fight back against injustice, or to give me a foundation of standing on my own against everyone, something along those lines." He was wrong, it wasn't them at all; or maybe he was right and they didn't know what they chose in the end. He doesn't know.
"I remember that toy. Vividly. I remember how it felt in my hand - real wood, rubbed smooth where my thumb worried at it over its back, the darker stripes through it from the wood grain, the rough spot on the nose." He rubs Nibbles' ear gently between his fingers until the cat pulls his head back, then butts K's hand again. He tightens his grip on Jesus's hand. "The date carved on the bottom: six, ten, twenty one."
He looks up at him, not sure what emotion he's seeing there. "But you do have implanted memories." So he couldn't have been born, unless they got hold of him and-- and what, programmed him?
"Do you know how to tell if a memory is real or not? Or is it just how memory works after a certain amount of time?" He does know, actually, but - "I didn't know for sure until I followed the birth certificate to the orphanage, and found the toy hidden in the boiler room exactly where I remembered putting it."
He doesn't know if he could identify it in himself, but K has already told him how he can tell which of his memories are fake. He just listens, though, more confused by the turn K is describing.
K can tell that he's lost Jesus somewhere, that he hasn't drawn the lines clear enough - maybe he can't. Maybe it doesn't make as much sense outside his head as it does inside, maybe it won't ever to someone who wasn't from their world.
But that's the thing: it was impossible. He remembers knowing with equal intensity both that it was impossible, the conclusion he'd come to, and that it was the soundest conclusion to draw.
"I didn't know what to do," he says quietly, and pulls both his legs up onto the couch, curling one carefully around Nibbles to avoid disturbing him, making himself smaller.
"I thought it was me." He remembers drawing that figurine out of the coal, like reaching into his own mind and making it real in his palm.
"I'd never been so terrified. It didn't make any sense, but it was the only thing I could think of that did, and I couldn't talk to anyone about it. I told Joi, but that -" He shakes his head. You're too special for K. A real boy now. "She said my mother would have named me. She didn't want me to go by K anymore. She couldn't hear anything else, any other possibilities, but if the LAPD found out - if Wallace found out - if anyone found out..."
He swallows. In none of these scenarios could he come out alive. In none of them could his life just go back to the way it was.
Jesus knows what he would have done. But he wasn't created to be loyal to anything or anyone in particular. He has the freedom of fighting and bucking orders he doesn't like; he's done it before, negotiated his own way forward. He has never been property.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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People file DNA sequences? He supposes that makes crime easier to solve, especially in a city as large as the one K is from.
"It's okay," he murmurs, one hand on K's.
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He had known then, after all. As best as he could, he knew, once he knew it was a possibility. He catches Nibbles' paw and massages the pad of his foot, then rubs his ears wordlessly, feeling the warmth and weight of Jesus's hand on his and thinking he doesn't want to keep going. He doesn't want to connect the dots he's thrown out for consideration.
He swallows, continues in a voice so low it's almost mumbling, except even now he enunciates clearly enough to be understood. "My earliest memory is in an orphanage. I don't remember who dropped me off there or why, too young probably, or I always assumed it simply wasn't part of the memory. Instead it's... about a toy I had. A carved horse figurine. Other kids in the orphanage wanted it, but it was all I had, so I ran with it. I hid it. I tried to convince them I'd burned it in the furnace, but they didn't believe me, and there were more of them than me."
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But that's not K, who takes the beating. Even now.
"I thought they gave you memories to make you stable." Nothing about growing up in an orphanage makes a person more stable.
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"It's to avoid there being nothing at all. No connection to anything, no loyalty to anyone but ourselves. I always assumed they chose that memory to make me grateful for what I have now, or to make me want to fight back against injustice, or to give me a foundation of standing on my own against everyone, something along those lines." He was wrong, it wasn't them at all; or maybe he was right and they didn't know what they chose in the end. He doesn't know.
"I remember that toy. Vividly. I remember how it felt in my hand - real wood, rubbed smooth where my thumb worried at it over its back, the darker stripes through it from the wood grain, the rough spot on the nose." He rubs Nibbles' ear gently between his fingers until the cat pulls his head back, then butts K's hand again. He tightens his grip on Jesus's hand. "The date carved on the bottom: six, ten, twenty one."
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But then they'd already know what they had.
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"Do you know how to tell if a memory is real or not? Or is it just how memory works after a certain amount of time?" He does know, actually, but - "I didn't know for sure until I followed the birth certificate to the orphanage, and found the toy hidden in the boiler room exactly where I remembered putting it."
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The memory had to be real.
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But that's the thing: it was impossible. He remembers knowing with equal intensity both that it was impossible, the conclusion he'd come to, and that it was the soundest conclusion to draw.
"I didn't know what to do," he says quietly, and pulls both his legs up onto the couch, curling one carefully around Nibbles to avoid disturbing him, making himself smaller.
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"I thought it was me." He remembers drawing that figurine out of the coal, like reaching into his own mind and making it real in his palm.
"I'd never been so terrified. It didn't make any sense, but it was the only thing I could think of that did, and I couldn't talk to anyone about it. I told Joi, but that -" He shakes his head. You're too special for K. A real boy now. "She said my mother would have named me. She didn't want me to go by K anymore. She couldn't hear anything else, any other possibilities, but if the LAPD found out - if Wallace found out - if anyone found out..."
He swallows. In none of these scenarios could he come out alive. In none of them could his life just go back to the way it was.
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"What did you do?"
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