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hiccanna-tidbits · 2 years

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HICCANNA MONTH WEEK 3, DAY 5 - SCI-FI AU BLADE RUNNER

Next up for Hiccanna Month: Another fic idea that’s been bouncing around in my head like a Windows screensaver since 2015! GOD, I remember watching Blade Runner for the first time alone in my dorm room my freshman year, and just getting OBSESSED--and, of course, the first thing my brain does is start building an overly-detailed Hiccanna/RotBTFD AU longfic that I’ll never have time to write XD Idk, maybe someday???

WELL ANYWAYS. Figured y’all deserved to see the base concept that I get super obsessed with every now and again, even if I never do anything with it XD I’ve read the book the movie’s based off of, too, so some concepts from the book found their way in here as well. I also rewatched the movie for this, and lemme tell you, that shit holds up--like every other cyberpunk dystopia deadass wishes they could be Blade Runner (1982). How they did all those flying cars and futuristic buildings and shit with practical effects and mini-sets is beyond me.

Fic summary under the cut! As always, moodboard pic credits available upon request!

***

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was one of the best Blade Runners in Los Angeles back in the day. Not like he had much choice in his career; he comes from a long line of proud android hunters--strong, ruthless men who will do anything necessary to protect humanity from its own rogue AI creations. Hiccup trained to “retire” replicants since childhood--and with excellent tracking skills, sharp intellect, and ruthless pragmatism, he was very good at his job.

Natural talent or not, blade running wasn’t a job that Hiccup could stomach forever. Eventually the brutality took a toll--it became more and more of a weight to bear, killing beings who looked just a little too human. Hiccup decides to retire early (much to the chagrin of his late father, he’s sure), turning in his pistols and retreating to his high-rise apartment. The perks of a such a dangerous and taxing job were that it didn’t pay half bad, and Hiccup has plenty to support himself for a while. And that’s all that’s really needed--no wife, no girlfriend, no roommates, only one real friend.

Despite his success in his career, Hiccup is a lonely man. He’s never particularly connected with his coworkers, not finding much joy or satisfaction in retiring replicants. The women he tries his luck often as not find him too awkward or sulky or sarcastic--hardly the charming man with a vibrant life that many seek.

Hiccup’s best and only friend is an electric black cat, found in an alleyway after work one day and lured into his building with canned tuna and freeze-dried salmon. He doesn’t know the precise story behind the abandoned cat, but what he’s able to semi-confidently piece together (he is a detective, after all) is that the artificial cat was an attempted scam--pawned off as real, as so many high-quality, convincing electric animals are. Real animals are a rarity, most having died off as the world became choked with trash and pollution that apparently only the human animal could consistently stomach.

The cat could certainly pass as real--at first glance, anyways. In fact, Hiccup is initially shocked, wondering how he stumbled on a real flesh-and-blood feline in a city where practically everything else is artificial. When he gives the loud-meowing cat some dinner, though, he notices the teeth seem to slide in and out of the creature’s jaw as he eats in a way no organic cat’s would. Hiccup suspects this is what gave him away as a fake to whoever adopted him--and whoever must have thrown him out in the street.

Nevertheless, Hiccup knows what it is to be rejected. To be ostracized and excluded because you’re not what people want you to be. And someone needs to fix “Toothless”’s broken tail--which, upon closer inspection, is sparking every so often, too. Certainly a fire hazard if left to wander about the city.

Hiccup’s retirement is going rather well when things get upended. Toothless is good company, Hiccup can afford the nicest games and streaming services money can buy, and he even has time to indulge in a hobby he was always too busy for--tinkering with and fixing broken machinery.

Then one day, over his regular lunch of shrimp-and-beef ramen, his old boss shows up and says he’s needed for one last job.

Hiccup won’t hear of it. He’s done with killing and hurting and destroying things, no matter how much society would have him think it’s not “real” life. It turns out, however, that Hiccup’s boss isn’t letting go of his best Blade Runner so easily.

“Your cat,” he says. “Organic or electric?”

“Electric.”

Hiccup sees no reason to lie. If he claimed Toothless was organic and word got out, everyone and their mother would be trying to steal him.

“So his software is hooked into the Cloud, just like every other electric animal in the city. Their brains were built to share a network.”

Hiccup freezes.

“What I’m saying, Haddock, is that certain...city officials have access to the animal neurological networks in the Cloud. Sure would be a shame if Toothless’ got damaged...or shut down completely.”

And so Hiccup is on the case. There are four replicants total who must be retired, all rogues who got loose on a ship bound for Earth, killed all the human passengers, and hijacked the controls.

“Jack Frost,” the supposed leader, is tough-as-nails combat model built to withstand subzero temperatures and be far more flexible and agile than any human could hope to be. He’s wily and charismatic, as likely to try manipulating or sweet-talking you as shooting you.

“Merida,” another combat model, is the brawn of the group. Aggressive and ruthless, she’s not the sort to back out of a fight until her opponent is beyond dead.

“Rapunzel” has appropriately long blonde hair to match the fairy tale moniker, though she usually keeps it braided back and out of the way. She’s a standard pleasure bot, not an uncommon sight at exoplanet military outposts, but rumor has it she is not to be underestimated, and she’s not as soft as she looks.

“Anna” is another combat bot, although she’s not noted as being brutal like Merida or cunning like Jack. She is, according to her profile under her spinning head on the hologram screen, fairly average in every way.

Nonetheless, Hiccup can’t take his eyes off her. There’s an intriguing--almost playful--glint in her holographic eyes that draws him in.

He manages to track Anna down to a seedy part of town, finding out that she’s been forced to work as an “exotic dancer” of sorts to lay low while still paying the bills. He meets her backstage, claiming he needs to run a “safety inspection” on the premises, but it only takes a short conversation for Anna to see right through his cover. She attacks with superhuman strength, throwing him hard against a wall and making a run for it while the wind is knocked out of him.

Hiccup gives chase through grungy, neon-lit streets, nearly losing her among the raincoats and umbrellas of thick crowds a number of times. He finally corners her near a backalley, out-of-the-way clothing store, in a place where there are no cars or people or power boxes to hide behind. She dives through a display window, the effort of breaking glass slowing her down, and at last Hiccup has his chance.

Something stops him from pulling the trigger.

She turns and looks at him the second before he shoots, and her eyes are filled with blazing, palpable fear. The fear of a clearly sentient creature. Not so different from the fear Hiccup saw in Toothless’ eyes when he first met him, back when Hiccup was just another in a vast world of humans that only wanted to hurt him.

He lowers his gun, and watches as Anna scrambles into the darkness of the closed shop and out of sight. He starts home, feeling sick.

He knows he’ll have to kill her eventually...but not tonight. Not tonight.

He’s almost to his car when a cold, steely grip closes around his arm, yanking him into an alleyway. In the bright neon glow from the adjacent street, he recognizes the round face and tied-back head full of red curls immediately--Merida, the most vicious of the rogue replicants. She saw him shooting at Anna, her comrade and friend, and now he is deeply fucked.

It’s not much of a fight. Within seconds, Merida gains the upper hand--and is, to put it delicately, beating the ever-loving shit out of him. Hiccup makes his peace with the gods, recognizing that tragically, this is indeed an occupational hazard of being a Blade Runner.

She’s just about to land the killing blow when someone intervenes.

Shaken and battered, Hiccup gets to his feet. He leans against a wall, watching a blur of red and orange hair as he gets his breath back.

His rescuer, he realizes, is Anna.

Merida is hard to subdue, blinded by rage and lashing out wildly in her efforts to get back to Hiccup. Anna pleads for her to stop, trying to explain that Hiccup let her go--that he’s not worth killing if he could help them.

Hiccup realizes with a start that she must really believe that. Why else would she save his life?

Finally, the realization that Anna is alive and well--and not bleeding out from a gunshot wound outside some dingy shop--seems to sink in for Merida. She calms down and takes a step back, eyeing Hiccup with distaste.

“He’d better be useful,” she hisses. “Imagine of he really had killed yeh, huh? That’s jest what his lot do.”

She spits on Hiccup before stalking off.

After Merida leaves, Anna admits she followed Hiccup, wanting to know why a Blade Runner spared her. After a rather tense conversation--including but not limited to Anna painfully shoving Hiccup against a wall and conducting an impromptu interrogation--Hiccup admits the truth: He had to take the job to retire her and her friends because someone he loved would be in danger if he didn’t. Someone mechanical.

With a little more prodding, Hiccup admits that the people he used to work for threatened to deactivate Toothless if he didn’t dispose of the four rogue replicants “terrorizing the city.” Anna muses--half to herself--that she may be able to help. No one better to understand an artificial life form than another artificial life form, after all. And Anna has been to dozens of planets in all different types of spacecrafts and interfaced with hundreds of other AIs--if anyone understands AI coding and tampering, it’s her.

Besides, she saved his life. Him, a bounty hunter who got paid for killing beings like her. That has to count for something.

Before they know it, the two are forming a tentative alliance. Anna offers to take a look at Toothless’ software and try to figure out how to disconnect him from the cloud, thus cutting off any outside access to his neural circuits. In return, Hiccup will give her and her friends protection, ceasing his hunt for them for the time being and keeping their locations a secret from other Blade Runners.

With nowhere else for her to really go, Hiccup reluctantly tells Anna she can stay in the spare room of his apartment--only because she might be the only one who can potentially save Toothless, of course. That’s the only reason it’s worth the dangers. Hiccup supposes it’s just as well--easiest to keep her safe (so she can still be around to decode and free his cat) by keeping her close. Emotions can’t factor into this when replicants have none--not like humans do, anyway. Right?

It turns out Hiccup can’t stay nearly as detached as he hoped. The more Anna tries to figure Toothless out--muttering about his wires and his circuit board and his signals as she tinkers with the squirming feline--the more Hiccup tries to figure Anna out. She’s fascinated by the humans on earth--their food, their culture, their art. Their reverence for the biological and their utter disdain for the artificial. He often finds her asking for bites of his food (despite not needing to eat), or watching cars and ships pass out of his high-rise windows. She begs to tag along when he goes undercover in dingy parts of town, fascinated by the bustle of the crowds and the crammed markets with their shouting vendors and ever-flashing neon signs.

Protecting replicants, however, isn’t without its dangers—as Hiccup well suspected. His employers are becoming suspicious of his skills having grown so “rusty” that he misses every shot and he often just “can’t track the bastards down.” But as he grows closer to Anna and meets the rest of her friends, he realizes everything he’s been taught about replicants couldn’t be more wrong.

They’re intelligent, and they can be kind, emotional, loving, good. Their brains and souls are just as “real” as any human’s. All they want is what anyone wants—to not be treated as lesser for things they can’t help.

As Hiccup’s bond with Anna grows, she opens up to him about the horrors she’s faced. Bloody battles on distant planets. The death of her “sister” Elsa, a replicant made in the same factory as her who was the first living being she ever met. From the same line of Nexus models as Jack, Elsa was built to withstand frigid subzero temperatures...but it wasn’t enough to protect her from being slaughtered by a hoard of newer, even more cold-tolerant models.

Together with the four replicants he’s supposed to be hunting, Hiccup eventually uncovers a horrifying truth--all replicants are programmed to shut down permanently after 4 years. A self-destruct “failsafe” put in because humans were scared of their creations growing and developing in ways they couldn’t predict. Becoming a little too self-aware, and realizing how sick they are of living as second-class citizens. Before he knows it, Hiccup finds himself on a mission more perilous than ever: Find out how to override the programming sending his new friends toward an early doom, all while dodging the wrath of employers who will no doubt think poorly of him for fraternizing with the enemy, to say the least.

And the fact that he’s falling in love with his bounty isn’t going to make things any easier.

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