ABSTRACT
It is November 2019 and we are in the Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut (1992). Out of the vast industrial cityscape, an enormous Mayantemple-like building comes into view. It is the Tyrell Corporation and its business is manufacturing Replicants-products “designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions.” The reason for the exception is soon clear. Pris is “a basic pleasure model. A standard item for military clubs in the out colonies.” Imagine what it would be like if she had a rich array of human feelings. Or if Zhora, “trained for an off-world kick murder squad,” did. Or Roy Batty, a “combat model” designed for “optimum self-sufficiency.” With complex systems, though, you never know what they will do, given enough time: “The designers reckoned that after a few years, they might develop their own emotional responses. Hate, love, fear, anger, envy. So they built in a fail-safe device … Four-year lifespan.”1
