It is 2049; humans are now bioengineered, and they are also enslaved. K is a replicant who is a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, hunting and killing replicants who have fallen foul of the law. His official job description is blade runner. He retires a replicant named Sapper Morton whilst he is at a protein farm, and he also finds the remains of a female replicant in a box under a tree. She died during childbirth. K realizes that in finding her, he has also found knowledge that could start a war between humans and replicants; the bioengineered humans were thought to not be able to reproduce biologically. Finding the body of a pregnant woman shows that this is not the case. He tells his superior officer, Lt. Joshi, what he has found and Joshi is immediately worried about the implications. She tells K that he must seek out and kill the replicant's child, so that the evidence of her pregnancy is hidden forever.
First stop is the Wallace Corporation's headquarters; Wallace are the leading manufacturer of replicants and through their records the deceased female is identified as Rachael. She was designed by Dr Eldon Tyrell. Rachael was in a romantic relationship with Rick Deckard, who used to be a blade runner like K, K is now not the only person looking for Rachael's child; Niander Wallace, the corporation's CEO, sends an employee to take Rachael's remains from their resting place, because he believes that if he finds out how she managed to reproduce then he can use the knowledge to colonize other planets.
K is starting to wonder if he, too, was born naturally and not created, and this idea is put into his head originally by his Ai girlfriend, Joi. She notices that he is having a lot of memories and flashbacks, which is not strictly possible for a replicant because their memories are implanted. He finds the date 6-10-21 carved into a tree trunk at Morton's Farm. When he searches records at LAPD he finds that on that date, a pair of twins with identical DNA were born, but although the male child is listed as still living , the female child is not. He follows the information to an orphanage in San Diego, but the records for the year that he is looking for have been lost. The orphanage is familiar to him and he finds a toy horse, having remembered hiding it there.
Dr Ana Stelline is a replicant memory designer. She tells K that his memories are real, and from this he believes that he is Rachael's son.
Back at LAPD he fails his post-traumatic baseline test. This means that he is now considered to be a rogue replicant, and that a blade runner will be coming for him. Lieutenant Joshi gives him forty eight hours' head start and encourages him to disappear. He flees to Las Vegas after having the toy horse analyzed and learning that there are traces of radiation on it that come from there. Deckard is there also. He reveals that he fathered Rachael's child, and in order to protect the child he obliterated the records of birth, and handed him over to the replicant freedom movement.
Blade runner Luv realizes that Joshi has allowed K to escape and kills her. Hot on K's heels, she arrives in Vegas and kidnaps Deckard, leaving K for dead, but he is rescued by the replicant freedom movement. Their leader, Freysa, tells him that she actually helped to deliver Rachael's child, but it wasn't a boy, it was a girl. K realizes that he is not Rachael's child, and also connects the dots and realizes that Dr Ana Stelline is. The memory of the toy horse was Ana's own, and she implanted it into K's memory. She was not technically lying to K when she told him that the memory was real; it just did not belong to him. Freysa is very worried that Deckard will lead Wallace to Stelline and reveal her identity, For the greater good of all replicants, he needs to be killed, and Freysa asks K to be the one who does this.
Luv has already taken Deckard to the Wallace Corporation's H.Q. Wallace offers a clone of Rachael in exchange for everything that Deckard knows about her child, but Deckard will not cooperate K catches up with them as Deckard is being taken off-world via shuttle, drowning Luv but becoming hurt himself in the process. He fakes Deckard's death so that Wallace will not look for him, and then he takes Deckard to Stelline's office so that father and daughter can meet. K witnesses the meeting, as he lays dying on the steps outside.
