Facing Reality
Glenn stuck out his arm to block the closing elevator doors. They
slid open again and he walked over to Joseph, who was speaking with
the security officer for the building. Standing, a red drop fell
onto his hand, and Glenn looked up. Lee. He was impaled on an antenna,
his arms outstretched, his head hanging lifeless, blood slowly draining
from his broken form.
"Glenn." He turned and saw Joseph. The security officer
was walking away.
"What'd he have to say?"
"He saw Michael jump, saw him..."
"Yeah."
They stood in silence for a moment.
"We should get the police...or a Blade Runner," Glenn
said. "I'm not sure."
"We shouldn't attract too much attention, he wouldn't have
wanted that," Joseph said.
"Just call the police, get it over with."
Twenty minutes later, a police spinner landed, and Dave Rutger,
a Blade Runner judging by his looks, exited. He stepped under the
caution tape, set up by the LAPD's grunt force.
"You're the ones who made the call?" he asked Glenn and
Byron, flashing a badge.
"Yeah. I did," Joseph said. "It was a suicide, he
thought he was a rep. Ended it."
"I'm gonna' need a med team down here, we've got a big clean
up," Rutger said into a phone. "That's all that made him
do it?"
"Yeah, He was still the same to us, but I guess he couldn't
live with himself."
"I've seen this a lot - it's essentially a mental illness,
with only one cure," he said motioning to the antenna.
Glenn skulked away from their discussion, and looked up again at
the body of his friend. He was bloody, and pale-skinned, the life
drained from him, but he could still see the same man who had been
his friend for years, the only one of them who had challenged Tyrell,
the only one who could stand up to their boss.
It was a couple years back, before the introduction of the Nexus
6. They had all questioned the need to make the replicants even
more lifelike, but it was what Tyrell wanted, and it was a challenge.
Lee had seen the danger - that it would become impossible to tell
the replicants from the humans, impossible to distinguish between
the product of nature and the product of industry.
Glenn stared up at the antenna, and saw the end result of the Nexus
6, a good person, replicant or not, who was driven to suicide.
"He says they'll be able to find out if he was human by tomorrow,
we'll at least be able to see," Joseph said.
"Does it matter?"
"He wasn't a saint y'know, he did some questionable things."
Glenn was confused. "Like what? He was a great man, an idealist.
He wanted to change things."
"What's to be changed?"
"Everything, all that we're working for, the future we are
building."
"There's nothing wrong with our direction, we're doing what
Tyrell wants."
"That's what's wrong with it, Tyrell is only feeding his ego,
he wants to make his own race, and be a God. They'll replace us.
You know that. We are building the next species, there will be a
war."
Glenn walked away with new purpose. Lee's death would be the catalyst.
He walked to the elevator, and hit the up button. A minute later
the doors opened, and he saw Eldon Tyrell, the company's founder,
flanked by four armored soldiers aiming machine guns at him. Glenn
turned to run, but saw Joseph and the Blade Runner blocking the
exit. Tyrell took off his glasses and wiped the lenses on his shirt.
"Mr. Mironova, you're about to be replaced..."
Options
Option 1 - Run
Option 2 - Face Off
Option 3 - Fight
Option 4 - Michael
Lee
Option 5 - Other
Pages in white continue the story. Pages
in yellow are yet to be written. Note that the unwritten
options are just suggestions for how the story might continue
- you can add something completely different if you like.
Each page in the story ends in a five letter
code. If you want to return to this page in the future, make
a note of the page code and you will then be able to change
your URL to take you straight back to that page.
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Date: 2002-05-31 21:45
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