More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.
Decker is married in the book?
“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watching, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me.”
Even if our emotions are in full technological control, we can still use that control to hurt each other...
But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere,
And thus, the high value of any real animal, anything to hold onto in a decaying husk of a planet...
out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece,
Protecting fertility?
The legacy of World War Terminus had diminished in potency; those who could not survive the dust had passed into oblivion years ago, and the dust, weaker now and confronting the strong survivors, only deranged minds and genetic properties.
He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.
I took him to the vet’s and he died, and I thought about it, and finally I called one of those shops that manufacture artificial animals and I showed them a photograph of Groucho. They made this.”
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.”
This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the suburbs of San Francisco,
In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.
fifth (or sixth?) anniversary of the founding of New America, the chief U.S. settlement on Mars.
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill.
as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging—accompanied by mental and spiritual identification—with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred.
They, his foster parents Frank and Cora Mercer, had found him floating on an inflated rubber air-rescue raft,
As Moses
Childhood had been nice; he had loved all life, especially the animals, had in fact been able for a time to bring dead animals back as they had been.
Local law prohibited the time-reversal faculty by which the dead returned to life; they had spelled it out to him during his sixteenth year. He continued for another year to do it secretly, in the still remaining woods, but an old woman whom he had never seen or heard of had told.
Isidore stood holding the two handles, experiencing himself as encompassing every other living thing, and then, reluctantly, he let go.
It was the only ostrich on the West Coast. After staring at it, Rick spent a few more minutes staring grimly at the price tag.
The Nexus-6 brain unit they’re using now is capable of selecting within a field of two trillion constituents,
But then the Voigt Empathy Test had been devised by the Pavlov Institute working in the Soviet Union.
In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no intelligence test would trap such an andy.
An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism—an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet.
You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them
All that money, he thought. And yet, people buy them; some people have that kind of money.
He passed by Bryant’s receptionist—attractive, with waist-length braided silver hair—and then the inspector’s secretary, an ancient monster from the Jurassic swamp, frozen and sly, like some archaic apparition fixated in the tomb world.
including several humans, as well as their new androids. But you won’t know. It’ll be my decision, in conjunction with the manufacturers.
“This is the first time you’ll be acting as senior bounty hunter.
If you can’t pick out all the humanoid robots, then we have no reliable analytical tool and we’ll never find the ones who’re already escaping. If your scale factors out a human subject, identifies him as android—”
When he landed the police department hovercar on the roof of the Rosen Association Building in Seattle, he found a young woman waiting for him. Black-haired and slender, wearing the new huge dust-filtering glasses, she approached his car,
“A major manufacturer of androids,” he said thoughtfully, “invests its surplus capital on living animals.” “Look at the owl,” Rachael Rosen said. “Here, I’ll wake it up for you.” She started toward a small, distant cage, in the center of which jutted up a branching dead tree.
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 possesions and technology
The senior Rosen’s nervousness buoyed up his own confidence. They’re afraid of me, he realized with a start. Rachael Rosen included. I can probably force them to abandon manufacture of their Nexus-6 types;
The powerful dispise when the servants hold power over their playground...
This enterprise is considered one of the system’s industrial pivots; the manufacture of androids, in fact, has become so linked to the colonization effort that if one dropped into ruin, so would the other in time.
“The girl,” he added, “is lying facedown on a large and beautiful bearskin rug.” The gauges remained inert, and he said to himself, An android response. Failing to detect the major element, the dead animal pelt. Her—its—mind is concentrating on other factors. “Your husband hangs the picture up on the wall of his study,” he finished, and this time the needles moved.
cheek. “You’re an android,” he said. “That’s the conclusion of the testing,” he informed her—or rather it—and Eldon Rosen, who regarded him with writhing worry; the elderly man’s face contorted, shifted plastically with angry concern.
“The issue is that your empathy delineation test failed in response to my niece. I can explain why she scored as an android might. Rachael grew up aboard Salander 3. She was born on it; she spent fourteen of her eighteen years living off its tape library and what the nine other crew members, all adults, knew about Earth. Then, as you know, the ship turned back a sixth of the way to Proxima.
For whom is this fiction? For Rachael?
“I’m not going to be given a chance to check out a single Nexus-6. You people dropped this schizoid girl on me beforehand.”
It, he thought. She keeps calling the owl it. Not her. “Just a second,” he said. Pausing at the door, Rachael said, “You’ve decided?”
“Does she know?” Sometimes they didn’t; false memories had been tried various times, generally in the mistaken idea that through them, reactions to testing would be altered. Eldon Rosen said, “No. We programmed her completely. But I think toward the end she suspected.” To the girl he said, “You guessed when he asked for one more try.” Pale, Rachael nodded fixedly.
The Nexus-6. He had now come up against it. Rachael, he realized; she must be a Nexus-6. I’m seeing one of them for the first time. And they damn near did it; they came awfully damn close to undermining the Voigt-Kampff scale,
Fear made her seem ill; it distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her and then, with malice, patched her together badly.
“Why not?” Again she shuddered nervously, grimacing in awareness of saying something wrong.
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders
But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”
Kipple = chaos = entropy
“But an empathy box,” he said, stammering in his excitement, “is the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone.
Isidore said, “Could you maybe fix dinner for us? If I brought home the ingredients?” “No, I have too much to do.” The girl shook off the request effortlessly, and he noticed that, perceived it without understanding it. Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. 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.
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.
A special, a chickenhead; what do I know? I can’t marry and I can’t emigrate and the dust will eventually kill me. I have nothing to offer.
