There were always a lot of replicants prowling the Silvertone in those days. It’s no wonder that they shut the place down even though it was infinitely cooler, in its eastside transgressive way, than the garbage fire of corporate neon beer signs and classic rock cover bands that replaced it. The replicants were deployed to places like the Silvertone because it was dark and loud, everybody was drunk or high on some street produced pharmaceutical, and they could mix into the crowd even on a day when they were slipping a circuit or having a more provactive malfunction. For the audience it was just another hallucination that they’d have to explain to themselves in the morning. A woman’s eye fell out on the floor in front of the stage one night during a Chemical Spray show. There was nobody in the crowd because it was raining sleet sideways with an unforgiving windchill and the band was all incandescent growl and fury. The sound guy abandoned his board to me@and Jordyn and we push all the levels into the red. I saw the eye pop out of the woman’s skull and wobble across the beer stained, mud encrusted floor over toward an ancient stretch of carpet and I saw a soft wisp of dust or smoke escape her socket as the eye went away on her. The rest of the band didn’t seem to notice anything. They were just sawing away in malevolent noise bliss while the sparse crowd lingered near the bar or the pool table and seemed oblivious to her plight. In those days the replicants were not as perfectly manicured as they are today, there was an oscillation to the neck that was absent from their flesh and bone forebears, and the sound of their fingernails on a bar top clicked with an odd, flat heaviness that belied a sinister alloy. You could meet a replicant and fall in love. They could tell you a very funny joke or perform tricks of magic and you’d be convinced. Their flesh was so real that nobody would ever think any different in the throes of sex but they did have one telling flaw. Olivia, the replicant that I dated a few times after dark in those days, left no trace in the thin layer of snow under the lamp lights in the alley behind the Silvertone as she walked away.