Replicant Night by K. W. Jeter Page A

lead a tragic life."
    In the corridor leading toward the emigrant colony's center, beneath the banks of flickering or grey-dead fluorescent tubes, devolved human figures moved, scuttling furtively with their last meager, pawnable treasures clutched to their chests, heading for the ragtag booths and alleys of the black-market district. Even farther down the scale, appearing hardly human at all, were the creeping forms of those who had completely fallen out of the colony's hard-screw economy, those who'd come to the frayed end of their money and possessions and had been cut off from the cable monopoly's feed. Faces devoid of reason as any vegetable lifted and swiveled toward the scene at the Niemand hovel's front door, idiot eyes and other receptors searching for any sensory input. Red stigmata flecked the angles of the stimulus-lorn heads, with the same markings repeated on the corridor's dented walls. Every muscle near the softly keening mouths twitched with the constant hunger of misfired synapses.
    A tragic life , mused Sarah as she gazed past the two surprise callers. The length of her vision reached beyond the other locked or boarded-up hovel doors to low-ceilinged rooms containing yet more collapsing nervous systems. She wasn't sure what the man meant. She had worked a long time to engineer the destiny that had brought her to this place. A particular hell, or any one at all- I belong here , thought Sarah.
    Seized by a dreadful suspicion, she refocussed on the two men at her door. "You're not Jehovah's Witnesses, are you?" That would be all she needed right now, to get handed an animated Watchtower , complete with stereophonic sound effects triggered by the warmth of her thumb and forefinger. "Or New Reformed Apocalypticists?" Another of the groups that had been seen recently, evangelizing through the emigrant colonies-she looked to see if one of them was carrying a miniature holographic projector suitable for evoking biblical dioramas in the corridor's thin, acrid-smelling air.
    The two men gazed blankly at her through their black-rimmed, square lenses. "No-" The left one shook his head. "We're not here to ask you for money or anything-"
    Her laugh barked out. "Good call."
    "This is a personal matter. For you alone, Mrs. Niemand." He raised a pale, fussily manicured hand, pointing to the interior of the hovel behind her. "May we come in? To talk with you? I'm sure you'll find it of interest."
    Gun dangling at her side, Sarah peered more closely at the two men. They seemed oddly familiar to her, positions on a memory track that her brain hadn't moved along for some time. Her eyes had adjusted to the corridor's partial light spectrum; she could better perceive the pair now. White shirts and narrow-lapelled suits, black as an old-fashioned undertaker's; anal-retentive bow ties cinched tight onto their reedy, knobbly throats, not much bigger around than the narrow wrists exposed at their cuffs. The men's owlish regard, framed by the sharp-cornered spectacles, tweaked a cord in her gut.
    The snufflers in the corridor's rubble had started edging closer, attracted by the sounds of human voices. Sarah knew that if she slammed the door shut and left the two men outside, and they went on pounding and calling to her through the thin panel, the hovel would be overrun by stim-desperate hordes, the pressure of their clambering bodies enough to collapse the rickety walls. "All right-" Sarah stepped back from the door. "Get in here. But you'd better make your spiel quick. As I said, I'm expecting my husband any time now." She gave another bitter laugh. "God knows he's a jealous sonuvabitch."
    Once inside, with the corridor's sickly light and recycled air shut away, she busied herself with her black-market cigarettes, extracting one of the dwindling number from the cellophane-swathed pack and getting it lit. Tossing the charred match onto the floor with the others, she tilted her head back and dragged the smoke into the innermost recesses