It’s a happy day on both Earth and the off-world colonies alike, at least for high-level replicants who haven’t been “retired” yet. That’s because today, June 10, 2021, is the date repeatedly shown in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 as the birth date of the miracle replicant messiah baby conceived by Nexus-7 replicant Rachael and Blade Runner Rick Deckard (who is also probably a replicant). The birth should’ve been impossible, because replicants are definitely just pieces of machinery who don’t have thoughts or feelings of their own and shouldn’t be capable of having children, because then it would be harder to argue that they’re not normal people and humans might start feeling bad for how they treat them (humans are the worst). That’s what makes this miracle messiah baby so important to the distinctly Jared Leto-like creep Niander Wallace, who wants to use the miracle baby to figure out how he can make more miracle babies and satiate his enormous god-complex…. but that hasn’t happened yet, because it’s still only 2021.
Rachael died in childbirth, but the baby was saved by former combat medic Sapper Morton (a Dave Bautista-like replicant with tiny glasses) and put into hiding with some help from the underground Replicant Resistance. After that, maybe the child will have a slightly terrifying childhood growing up in a creepy apocalyptic orphanage run by Lennie James from The Walking Dead (err, a guy who looks like Lennie James, because we’re operating under the premise that this news story exists in the Blade Runner universe). Maybe the child will get adopted by parents who eventually have to leave her behind on Earth when they move to space, and then she’ll get a job creating fake memories for replicants that are occasionally based on her own memories.
Then maybe one of those memories will get implanted in a future replicant Blade Runner who looks like Ryan Gosling and is in a relationship with an A.I. named Joi, and for a while he’ll think that he’s the miracle replicant messiah baby… but no, he’s just a regular replicant who is not special in any way, which is what inspires him to use his otherwise meaningless life to save Deckard from Niander Wallace so he can finally be reunited with his daughter. It’s a pretty good story, and we can all look forward to it happening in 28 years or so. Until then, though, happy birthday to the miracle replicant messiah baby who will force us all to rethink what it means to be more human than human.