Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night

Background

After The Edge of Human, Deckard travels off-world with Sarah Tyrell, who had impersonated Rachael, and takes a consulting job on a film dramatizing his career as a blade runner. A replicant actor playing Leon is killed on camera with live ammunition, and Dave Holden, trying to deliver a mysterious suitcase, is captured and shot during a staged reenactment of his Voight-Kampff interview. The suitcase holds an artificial personality construct modeled on Roy Batty, which asks Deckard to carry encrypted data from J. R. Isidore's research to replicants in distant colonies, along with sensory capsules preserving the consciousness of J. F. Sebastian.

On Mars, Sarah is persuaded by agents of a clandestine continuation of the Tyrell Corporation to explore the wreck of the Salander 3 and finds a young girl identical to Rachael. Marley reveals that the suitcase's signal would compel male replicants in the colonies, who have begun to reproduce, to destroy their own offspring, and destroys it. On a reconstructed set of Sebastian's Bradbury Building residence Deckard shows that Sarah and Rachael are twin daughters born aboard the Salander 3, a secret test of whether replicants could reproduce in deep space; confronted with proof that she is a replicant, Sarah dies by suicide, and Deckard leaves with the child. Published as a paperback original, the novel is part of the trilogy Jeter wrote between 1995 and 2000; commentators have noted its heavier emphasis on conspiracy compared with Dick's more introspective original.