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And then, as she ate the slice of peach, she began to cry. Cold tears descended her cheeks, splashed on the bosom of her dress. He did not know what to do, so he continued dividing the food.
“The androids,” she said, “are lonely, too.” “Do you like the wine?” She set down her glass. “It’s fine.” “It’s the only bottle I’ve seen in three years.”
Anyhow, there’s a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like.
Two people stood in the dim hall, a small woman, lovely in the manner of Greta Garbo,
the man larger, with intelligent eyes but flat, Mongolian features which gave him a brutal look.
“So that leaves—” Pris said. “The three of us,” Irmgard said with apprehensive urgency. “That’s why we’re here.” Roy Baty’s voice boomed out with new, unexpected warmth; the worse the situation, the more he seemed to enjoy it. Isidore could not fathom him in the slightest.
“Well, they got everybody else,” Irmgard said, matter-of-factly; she, too, like her husband, seemed strangely resigned, despite her superficial agitation. All of them, Isidore thought; they’re all strange. He sensed it without being able to finger it. As if a peculiar and malign abstractness pervaded their mental processes.
Poor Luba; stuck in the War Memorial Opera House, right out in the open. No difficulty finding her.” “Well,” Roy said stiltedly, “she wanted it that way; she believed she’d be safer as a public figure.”
These people must have done something. Perhaps they emigrated back to Earth illegally.
But even so, no one got killed deliberately anymore. It ran contrary to Mercerism.
“Roy Baty is as crazy as I am,” Pris said. “Our trip was between a mental hospital on the East Coast and here. We’re all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives—flattening of affect, it’s called. And we have group hallucinations.” “I didn’t think it was true,” he said, full of relief.
“You’re intellectual,” Isidore said; he felt excited again at having understood. Excitement and pride. “You think abstractly, and you don’t—” He gesticulated, his words tangling up with one another. As usual. “I wish I had an IQ like you have;
he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that—it’s everything to him. It’s hard for us to grasp that, but it’s true.”
I’ll tell you what we trust that fouls us up, Roy; it’s our goddamn superior intelligence!”
employees of the animal dealer loaded the crate of goat into the car. I own an animal now, he said to himself. A living animal, not electric. For the second time in my life.
get my confidence, my faith in myself and my abilities, back. Or I won’t keep my job.
She’ll be angry, he said to himself. Because it’ll worry her, the responsibility. And since she’s home all day, a lot of the maintenance will fall to her. Again he felt dismal.
“It’s not false?” “Absolutely real,” he said. “Unless they swindled me.” But that rarely happened; the fine for counterfeiting would be enormous: two and a half times the full market value of the genuine animal. “No, they didn’t swindle me.”
Maybe you’ll have kids; I’ll maybe trade you my colt for a couple of kids.”
“It would be immoral not to fuse with Mercer in gratitude,” Iran said.
Physical pain but spiritually together; I felt everyone else, all over the world, all who had fused at the same time.”
I want you to transmit the mood you’re in now to everyone else; you owe it to them. It would be immoral to keep it for ourselves.”
“They’ll have our joy,” Rick said, “but we’ll lose. We’ll exchange what we feel for what they feel. Our joy will be lost.”
Emotional entropy
Three more andys, Rick thought to himself, that I should have followed up on today, instead of coming home.
Mercer doesn’t have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn’t required to violate his own identity.
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
Everything must end...
He doesn’t know any more than I do. He’s just an old man climbing a hill to his death.” “Isn’t that the revelation?” Rick said, “I have that revelation already.”
And I’m wasting my time appealing to you, he reflected. An android can’t be appealed to; there’s nothing in there to reach.
Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude.
Baty had tried to force the fusion experience into existence for itself—and then, when that fell through, it had engineered the killing of a variety of human beings…followed by the flight to Earth.
“Can you get this open?” she asked. “It’s worth a fortune, you realize. It’s not synthetic; it’s from before the war, made from genuine mash.”
Rachael’s proportions, he noticed once again, were odd; with her heavy mass of dark hair, her head seemed large, and because of her diminutive breasts, her body assumed a lank, almost childlike stance.
Leaning forward an inch, he kissed her dry lips. No reaction followed; Rachael remained impassive. As if unaffected. And yet he sensed otherwise.
I think you’re asking too much. You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?” “Empathy,” he said. “Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that’s what’ll happen. In the confusion you’ll retire me, not her.
then I report back and the association makes modifications of its zygote-bath DNS factors. And we then have the Nexus-7.
And, more, Rachael had begun to tease him. Imperceptibly she had passed from lamenting her condition to taunting him about his.
Standing there he realized, all at once, that he had acquired an overt, incontestable fear directed toward the principal android.
“You think I’ll retire one of your andys for you?” “I think in spite of what you said you’ll help me all you can. Otherwise you wouldn’t be lying there in that bed.” “I love you,” Rachael said. “If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I’d score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”
Rachael said, “Do you know what the lifespan of a humanoid robot such as myself is? I’ve been in existence two years. How long do you calculate I have?” After a hesitation he said, “About two more years.” “They never could solve that problem. I mean cell replacement. Perpetual or anyhow semi-perpetual renewal. Well, so it goes.” Vigorously she began drying herself. Her face had become expressionless.
Up until this point, there has been no mention of an expiration date
Rachael said, “Or we could live in sin, except that I’m not alive.” “Legally you’re not. But really you are. Biologically. You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity.”
“No bounty hunter ever has gone on,” Rachael said. “After being with me. Except one. A very cynical man. Phil Resch. And he’s nutty; he works out in left field on his own.” “I see,” Rick said. He felt numb. Completely. Throughout his entire body.
“How many times have you done this?” “I don’t remember. Seven, eight. No, I believe it’s nine.” She—or rather it—nodded. “Yes, nine times.” “The idea is old-fashioned,” Rick said.
Beside him in the darkness the coal of her cigarette glowed like the rump of a complacent lightning bug: a steady, unwavering index of Rachael Rosen’s achievement. Her victory over him.
The potent, strong fragrance of happiness still bloomed in him, the sense of being—for the first time in his dull life—useful. Others depend on me now, he exulted as he trudged down the dust-impacted steps to the level beneath.
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed.
“Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly. With the scissors, Pris snipped off one of the spider’s legs.
“Blowups of the video pictures,” a new voice from the TV said, “when subjected to rigorous laboratory scrutiny, reveal that the gray backdrop of sky and daytime moon against which Mercer moves is not only not Terran—it is artificial.”
“In other words,” Buster Friendly broke in, “Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all.”
It's like proving Kubrick staged the Passion of the Christ
It has often been said by adherents of the experience of Mercerism that Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, that he is in fact an archetypal superior entity perhaps from another star.
And who, then, has spawned this hoax on the Sol System? Think about that for a time, folks.” “We may never know,” Irmgard murmured. Buster Friendly said, “We may never know. Nor can we fathom the peculiar purpose behind this swindle.
