Blade Runner 1982 ✧

He squeezed the trigger.

“No,” Lucian replied, a sad smile playing on his lips. “I’m just a mirror. Pull the trigger. Or don’t. But know this—the only difference between you and me is the date stamped on my retina. You kill because you’re ordered to. I killed because I wanted to feel. Which one of us is the machine?”

Kael knew the protocol. Don’t engage. Don’t listen. Don’t let the machine trick you into seeing a man. But he was tired. So tired of the rain and the grime and the ghost of his own past. He glanced up. blade runner 1982

“What am I looking at?” Kael asked, his voice a low growl.

Kael had recited that mantra a thousand times. It was the only thing that let him sleep. He squeezed the trigger

He reached down and closed Lucian’s eyes. Then he ejected the spent power cell, let it clatter onto the wet marble, and walked away. He didn’t call for a pickup. He just walked into the city, a single drop in a billion, wondering if he was the hunter, the hunted, or just another machine waiting for its incept date to expire.

Lucian nodded, a slow, sorrowful dip of his chin. “I know.” Pull the trigger

“They always send me,” Kael replied. “You killed three people at the off-world colony. Two of them were children.”