The entire premise of the original Blade Runner revolved around rogue Replicants being on the loose, and Rick Deckard–the Blade Runner–being the one man who could stop them. While that is a bit of an oversimplification of events, the idea here is that Replicants rebelling is written in the proverbial DNA of this franchise, which makes the first rebel Replicant’s ‘power’ so fitting–and totally unique.

Replicants are synthetic humans originally created by the Tyrell Corporation to act as slaves for humanity. The Replicants would work in off-world colonies and do jobs too dangerous for humans to do. In order to ensure the highest level of productivity and creative innovation without human oversight, the Replicants were made self-aware. The thinking behind that decision was if they could want and strive for things internally, then that would reflect in their work. Basically, Tyrell wanted to make them as close to human as possible, which made the ethics behind enslaving them utterly shady–and some Replicants agreed. Rather than conforming to their work orders, some Replicants decided that they wanted to live their lives the way they wanted to, and rejected the idea that they had to commit their minds and bodies to humanity’s labor. So, to handle these free-thinkers, the Blade Runner Unit was created to hunt down any Replicant that stepped out of line. But, not before an army of them were created by one Replicant with the power to open their eyes to the truth.

Blade Runner’s First Rebel Replicant Could Free Other Replicants’ Minds

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In Blade Runner: Origins by K. Perkins, Mellow Brown, and Fernando Dagnino, readers learn how the very first Blade Runner came to be, and the events leading up to the creation of that particular law enforcement unit. During this time, a special kind of Replicant was created by Tyrell Corp: the Nexus-5. The Nexus-5 was more human than any other Replicant model before it in terms of what feelings its artificial brain was able to process–but that’s not all. This Nexus-5 was the result of a transference of human consciousness, meaning that everything that made this Replicant alive originated with a living person. With this human consciousness transfer, Nia was born, and so, too was her unparalleled power. With just a few words, Nia could make an average Replicant aware that he or she was a slave to humanity, allowing them to join her freedom-fighting cause against the corrupt system of slavery and death.

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Nia’s ability was incredible to witness, and proved to be integral to the rise of the Replicant rebellion (which actually infiltrated the Blade Runner Unit upon its inception). However, there was one caveat: not all Replicants could handle the truth. While Nia’s core group were silently working towards freeing themselves and other Replicants from enslavement, other Replicants went insane when their minds were opened to the truth, and they violently lashed out against their human masters. This raised a great number of red flags, and eventually led to Nia’s death and the subsequent creation of the Blade Runner Unit. With her death, Nia’s ability died with her, as the creator of Nia and the Nexus-5 deleted every trace of data within Tyrell’s systems regarding her creation. That meant no other Replicant would ever be like Nia again, which only made her ability that much more unique.

While it may be sad that Replicants can’t unlock the minds of their unwittingly enslaved brethren with a mere word anymore, the work Nia did was enough to ensure her revolution lived on long after she was gone–something that was seemingly confirmed in Blade Runner 2049–and it was all thanks to the totally unique ability exhibited by Blade Runner’s first rebel Replicant.