Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Philip K. Dick

“I’ve never killed a human being in my life.” His irritability had risen now; had become outright hostility. Iran said, “Just those poor andys.”

At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).

The humans are able to artificially change their emotions yet the robots who have artificial emotions are not human

absence of life,

“But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”

Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.

Mercerism.”

“It’s not the same,” Barbour finished.

“I don’t know; maybe it doesn’t make any difference.”

You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and anti-empathic. I mean, technically it’s not a crime like it was right after W.W.T., but the feeling’s still there.”

2

These animals represent empathy. The humans view it as an inherently empathetic act which they consider holy. The title then means “do androids dream of synthetic empathy”

In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.

the Synthetic Freedom Fighter,

That had been the ultimate incentive of emigration: the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as stick. The U.N. had made it easy to emigrate, difficult if not impossible to stay. Loitering on Earth potentially meant finding

oneself abruptly classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race.

Once pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history. He ceased, in...

halcyon days of the pre–Civil War Southern states! Either

dignity.”

Mors certa, vita incerta,

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off.

cogitated.

He felt depressed. And yet, logically, because of Dave’s sudden disappearance from the work scene, he should be at least guardedly pleased.

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another.

Both viewpoints repelled him.

As Isidore knocked on the apartment door, the television died immediately into nonbeing. It had not merely become silent; it had stopped existing, scared into its grave by his knock.

“I almost passed the IQ test,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “I’m not very special, only moderately; not like some you see. But that’s what Mercer doesn’t care about.”

and he noticed that, perceived it without understanding

Bro all the time with work kids

Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say.

“I’m Rachael Rosen.”

PKD YOU SLY DOG. Waiting to describe her so we couldnt tell if its her or not. Playing with my assumptions of chronology!

it’s an instinct.

Buster is the most important human being alive, except of course for Wilbur Mercer…but Mercer, he reflected, isn’t a human being; he evidently is an archetypal entity from the stars, superimposed on our culture by a cosmic template.

Hmmmmmm why?

job. If I hadn’t failed that IQ test I wouldn’t be reduced to this ignominious task with its attendant emotional by-products. On the other hand, the synthetic sufferings of false animals didn’t bother Milt Borogrove or their boss Hannibal Sloat. So maybe it’s I, John Isidore said to himself. Maybe when you deteriorate back down the ladder of evolution as I have, when you sink into the tomb world slough of being a special—well, best to abandon that line of inquiry.

Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster’s unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week.

Influencers

Sloat never cleaned his glasses. It was as if he had given up; he had accepted the radioactive dirt and it had begun its job, long ago, of burying him. Already it obscured his sight. In the few years he had remaining it would corrupt his other senses until at last only his bird-screech voice would remain, and then that would expire, too.

“Yes,” Sloat said finally, half snarling. “But it’s the waste that gets me. The loss of one more living creature. Couldn’t you tell, Isidore? Didn’t you notice the difference?”

“To him they’re all alive, false animals included. He probably tried to save it.”

ought to call them now before it starts to decay. Don’t dead bodies decay or something?” He felt elated.

you?”

In the background the racket of Buster Friendly boomed and brayed, eradicating her words; he saw her mouth moving but heard only the TV.

Most androids I’ve known have more vitality and desire to live than my wife. She has nothing to give me.

Könnte jeder brave Mann solche Glöckchen finden, seine Feinde würden dann ohne Mühe schwinden.

As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But

He is the grim reaper

I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake. Or anyhow so it must seem to them.

However vital, active, and nice-looking, an escaped android could hardly tell the truth; about itself, anyhow.

And again he perceived himself sub specie aeternitatis, the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here. Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed. If the androids had remained substandard, like the ancient q-40s made by Derain Associates—there would be no problem and no need of my skill.

“An android,” he said, “doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for.” “Then,” Miss Luft said, “you must be an android.”

“Still trees and bushes growing. The cabin is rustic knotty pine with a huge fireplace. On the walls someone has hung old maps, Currier and Ives prints, and above the fireplace a deer’s head has been mounted, a full stag with developed horns. The people with you admire the decor of the cabin and—”

This test is BS because it assumes you subscribe to the moral standards of the time they live in. Mercerism and all that. Those values are not universal even if they think so. I would fail this test. Anybody would.

“It’s a chance anyway, breaking free and coming here to Earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and wood louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.”

“I did at one time,” Rick said. “When my conscience occasionally bothered me about the work I had to do; I protected myself by thinking of them that way, but now I no longer find it necessary.