It is hard to understand why K saved Deckard when he had been asked to kill him to prevent Wallace from getting information from him -- in that Ana's memories are also those of K, could it be that K sees Deckard as the closest thing he could have as a father?
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Because he loves him.
K spends most of the movie believing that Deckard is his father. He goes to Las Vegas to find him and he confronts him about abandoning him. He is filled with anger but also a desire to know and understand Deckard.
Of course he then discovers that the memories are not his own, that the child was actually a girl and that Deckard is not his father.
You could imagine a human thus rejecting that relationship with Deckard as 'fake'. Why not kill Deckard and give the child to the replicant revolution.
But K is not human. In his existence everything is 'fake'. He desired so much to be 'real', to be born, to have a soul, to have a father. But he ends up back at the start, he is build, a machine, given fake memories, given a purpose, given a script. The resistance send him out with another mission, to kill Deckard and bring the child back to them.
He walks past an advertisement for Joi, an AI designed to literally tell him what he wants to hear. She is 'fake'. He is 'fake'. Everything is 'fake'
But in that moment he realises the central theme of the Bladerunner movies.
This isn't what matters. What matters is what you feel. The authenticity of that feeling doesn't alter the feeling.
All the characters live in a constructed artificial world. Roy Batty was built to be a slave, built to die after a few years, yet built to fear death. Rachel was built to believe she was human, given false memories, to believe she is 'real'. K was built to hunt and kill fellow replicants yet made to feel regret and sorrow at this. Joi was built to fall in love with her owner, irrespective of who that owner is.
We even discover that Rachel and Deckard's relationship was designed by Tyrell because he wanted to see if she could become pregnant. The 'miracle' the replicants believe in is as artificial as anything else.
The movie continues the theme of the first movie, that their lives and experience have value even if they are entirely artificial. The memory matters to you because you experience it now, in the present and it moves you.
As Stelline says to K early in the movie about the memory implants she makes for replicants
It is better than nice. It feels authentic. And if you have authentic memories you will have real human responses.
The real human response, the emotion the memory generates, is what is 'real'
At the end of the movie Deckard, who barely knows K, asks the same question you ask.
Why? What am I to you?
K just smiles back. Deckard is everything to him.
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