IT’S THE MONDAY MORNING

following the opening weekend of the movie Blade Runner 2049, and Eric C Leuthardt is standing in the centre of a floodlit operating room clad in scrubs and a mask, hunched over an unconscious patient.

“I thought he was human, but I wasn’t sure,” Leuthardt says to the surgical resident standing next to him, as he draws a line on the area of the patient’s shaved scalp where he intends to make his initial incisions for brain surgery. “Did you think he was a replicant?” “I definitely thought he was a replicant,” the resident responds, using the movie’s term for the eerily realisticlooking bioengineered androids.