Iris Knaught: The Blade Runner From Eye and Talon
Iris Knaught was an LAPD blade runner in K. W. Jeter's 2000 novel Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon. She hunted Eldon Tyrell's living owl, Scrappy, through monsoon Los Angeles after Tyrell Headquarters had fallen and Captain Bryant was dead. The division put a bounty on that bird higher than the pay for killing a replicant, and she took the hunt because a refusal would have cost her the badge.
Biography
The Interview Room
In a small interview room above night Los Angeles, a woman cop who was not Iris ran a Voigt-Kampff test on a heavy man whose coveralls read Leon. She had large eyes, pale skin, red lips, and dark hair set in a severe retro style, and she sat across the machine from him. She stalled on the desert questions, then skipped ahead to his mother. Leon shot her through the table, smashed the chair through the prefab wall, and left her bleeding on the floor. Two other people came into the room. They told Leon the scene had gone well enough, and that this woman had failed. They were going to try someone else.
That dead cop in the interview room was never named. The people who came in after the shooting said they would try another woman. Iris appeared after that scene, on a high ledge in monsoon rain over Los Angeles, with her black hair cut close to the scalp instead of worn in that retro style. She and the dead cop shared a pale face, large eyes, and red lips, the same face later matched to the replicant Rachael.
Joining The Division
Iris had childhood memories of the San Pedro freight docks and a dead sea at the edge of Los Angeles. A street orphanage locked a coded radio band on her ankle so she could check into hexagonal sleeping shelters at night. The band came off on her twenty-first birthday, and she signed away enough bodily security rights to enter LAPD basic training. The department drained her blood for a week, filled her with a cold substitute, and held her core at 78 degrees Fahrenheit while the lab scanned what had been taken out. She came out of that chamber into advanced training, then into the blade runner unit.
By the time Iris was a blade runner in Los Angeles, most of the runners who had lasted as long as she had were dead or burnt out. A winged pedestrian on Figueroa Boulevard pulled her kill ratio down from a clean one thousand. The gun in her shoulder holster was not LAPD issue, and she was making payments on it herself. Captain Bryant was dead in his office. Meyer, the new head of the blade runner division, took over that room, and the runners who failed a coming review were to be retired the same way replicants were.
The Chase After Enesque
The division sent Iris to a subterranean club under Angel's Flight to watch a replicant impersonator named Art Enesque. The act used a real Voigt-Kampff machine, with gauges large enough for the tables to see, and Iris spotted the lag in his responses that a trained operator uses to identify a replicant. She drew her gun in the club. Enesque grabbed a real pistol from the man playing the cop, fired into the crowd, and ran. She chased him up a sloping tunnel and onto a high ledge beside a cloud-projected geisha advertisement that put a pill in its mouth over and over.
On that high ledge, Enesque was less than ten meters from Iris, with the concrete ending in empty air, and he leapt for her throat. She shot him through the brow, the throat, and one shoulder. His last word may have been choice or chance, and she dismissed it as soon as she heard it. The corpse pinned her until she shoved it off the ledge and called an LAPD cleanup crew on her handset. His blood ruined the cactus-pattern silk shirt under her leatherite jacket. In the rain she told the head of the cleanup crew that she loved the work.
The Hunt For Scrappy
At the police station, in Bryant's wrecked office, Meyer would not pay Iris the double bounty on Enesque that day. Small machines moved over empty bottles, old kill lists, and dried blood while he gave her a file that was not a replicant at all. The photograph showed Scrappy, an owl sixty-four centimeters tall, and the bounty was higher than the kill she had just made. The leg band in the file read Property of the Tyrell Corporation. She told Meyer she hunted replicants, not birds, and that a living owl in Los Angeles would be a fake from the animal market. He said the bird was real, and that refusing the file would put her with the runners about to be cut.
Back in her apartment, Iris played the rest of the file and watched Eldon Tyrell feed Scrappy a live white rat in the penthouse, then wipe the blood from his fingers. A second clip put Rick Deckard in that same room with Rachael, who looked at the owl and called it artificial. Tyrell was dead by then, killed by Roy Batty, and the corporation was gone. Iris took the hunt for the bounty. No one had told her the bird carried a backup of a mind.
Iris looked for a real owl at the Los Angeles animal market. Dealers at a stall called Wings of Golden Smile offered a special-order fake and denied selling real birds. An Arab reptile shop remembered Deckard asking about a snake scale, and that trail ended in perfume and artificial snakes. In the rain outside the market, a buzz-cut man in a soaked duster, Vogel, called her Iris Knaught, the only use of her surname, and said the market search was a waste of time. She pulled Vogel into an alley, smashed his face on her knee, and he showed her a live picture of the owl chained on an upper theater floor, watched by men with illegal Czech rifles.
For the raid on that theater, Meyer passed Iris two armory cases at an abandoned warehouse on Traction Avenue, beside the concrete ditch of the Los Angeles River. Vogel brought capsules that dropped body heat enough to beat the theater's thermal alarms. They climbed an elevator shaft, used a glare grenade, and killed the men on the upper floor. Iris bagged Scrappy in an oxygen sack and left Vogel pinned in the firefight. At her apartment the bird matched the Tyrell-era archive, about a year older, and she fed it trap-mice from the building. She went to sleep with the owl in the apartment and the bounty unpaid, while monsoon rain steamed against the glass.
The Tyrell Ruins
That night Iris was asleep in her Los Angeles apartment, with Scrappy in a bag beside her. A man knocked her out with a shock sent through her chat, a small artificial pet in the room that talked and held onto her, then took the owl. She could not name him from what she saw. She woke in an LAPD hospital with the bird gone. Meyer, her division chief, fired her from the blade runner unit and from the department, then handed her the owl's broken leg band. Coordinates cut into that band pointed at the wreck of Tyrell Headquarters, a ruin that had not been on the maps she used in the city.
Iris followed those coordinates to the ruins of Tyrell Headquarters. Vogel was waiting there with one arm in a sling, and the sling was fake, because he had gotten out of the theater after she left him. In a buried room under the wreck he played a film by a director named Urbenton, a face-mapped restaging of the November 2019 hunt: Holden and Leon, Deckard's recall, Batty killing Tyrell, and Deckard leaving with Rachael. The rest of Los Angeles knew that broadcast. Iris had never watched it. Single frames put Rachael's face beside hers, and they matched. She broke down with her face pressed into the chair. When she stood up she called the story of replicant blade runners an old locker-room joke. Vogel said the face on the screen was the original, and that her own face belonged to it.
From the animal market onward, cameras had followed Iris without her knowing. Urbenton watched from a control room and was angry that Vogel had told her about the matching face. A film crew then drove her and Vogel up through the rubble to the top of the Tyrell ruin. Spinners that were not LAPD ships carried them east from there, and Vogel went along as the man paid to bring her.
The Desert Lab
Those spinners carried Iris east out of monsoon Los Angeles and landed in open desert, among dead road machines and a compound ringed by rusted earth-movers. Buried freeway signs for Pomona, Glendale, and Riverside stuck out of the sand. Inside the main building, Carsten, an old man with a cane, met her in a room of caged owls, none of them Scrappy. He spoke for the old replicant companies that had lost their business when U.N. troops cleared the field for Tyrell. He described the owl as a compressed backup of Tyrell's mind, updated about once a week in the old penthouse, and the eyes as the channel that moved new experience into the next body. Batty had crushed Tyrell's eyes and stopped that transfer. Iris asked why a bird mattered if the eyes were the prize, then went down into a trench that held Chew's eyeworks shop and a row of sleeping Tyrell copies.
In an ice-cold room under that desert compound, the last coffin held a woman identical to Iris, a sleeper named Rachael. The woman woke with a cry, and Iris shot her through the collarbone, then fired again and put the body back in the box. She did not know why she had fired. Carsten called it suicide with the shooter left alive, pulled the gun from her hand, and opened the chamber door. Meyer cut him down from the doorway, then shot Vogel outside for the pay Vogel had earned by steering her. Iris took her gun back from Carsten's hand. The compound was full of dead committee men and dead caged owls, and Scrappy flew to a man waiting beyond the fence.
Beyond the compound fence, the man waiting with Scrappy on his arm was Deckard, older than the face in Urbenton's film, with gray at the temples and a scar on the chin. A dark-haired girl in a single braid held his hand and gave her name as Rachael, the child who had left Mars with him in Replicant Night. Iris knew him as the thief from her apartment. He said she would have been killed if the owl had stayed with her. The girl said they could not go back to Los Angeles. Deckard said she could not return to the real city if she had never been there, and he pointed at constellations that were not Earth's. Iris said those stars proved nothing. He walked toward an unmarked spinner, and she followed him and the child.
Appearance
Iris wore her black hair cut close, with rain running under the collar of a jacket made from Kevlar-stranded leatherite, a synthetic leather. Under the jacket was a cactus-pattern silk shirt and a shoulder holster. The handgun was black, bulky, and hers, not a department piece, and she called cleanup on a police handset the department called a tight-cell. At home she had a chat, a small artificial animal that talked and clung to her, and that device was the route the thief used to shock her and take Scrappy. The unnamed cop in the interview room had the same pale face, large eyes, and red lips later matched to Rachael, and she wore her dark hair in a retro style while Iris wore hers cut close.
Similar Female Blade Runners
Olwen is the replicant Michelle Yeoh plays in Blade Runner 2099. She is a blade runner with only days left to live in a Los Angeles held by replicants, and the official premise pairs her with Cora. Showrunner Silka Luisa has said replicants in that series know the day they will die. Olwen has only those days left, and the series identifies her as a replicant. In Eye and Talon, Iris hunted Scrappy for the LAPD through monsoon Los Angeles, and during that hunt she was shown a face that matched Rachael's.
Aahna "Ash" Ashina was a human blade runner for the Los Angeles police in Titan's Blade Runner 2019 comics, written by Michael Green and Mike Johnson. A back injury limited her, and by 2039 her spine was failing. Alexander Selwyn hired her to bring back his daughter Cleo, and Ash stopped hunting the girl and left the department to protect her. Niander Wallace later offered a cure for that spine if Ash handed over the replicant Isobel. Ash refused the cure and stayed with the replicant underground.
Conclusion
Iris Knaught was the LAPD blade runner in Eye and Talon, K. W. Jeter's last authorized sequel to the 1982 film. She retired Art Enesque under a geisha advertisement, captured Scrappy, and then lost the owl, the bounty, and her place in the division. In the desert she shot a sleeping Rachael who had her face. Deckard met her there with a child of that name, under stars that were not Earth's, and she went with them to an unmarked spinner. The book does not say whether she was human.
Appearances
- Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon by K. W. Jeter (Gollancz, 2000)
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore
