Status Updates From Do Androids Dream of Electr...

i love you. if i entered a room and found a sofa covered in your hide i’d score very high on the voigt-kampff test

Next to her the electric toad flopped and rustled in its box; she wondered what it "ate," and what
repairs on it would run. Artificial flies, she decid

And the killers throw the rocks; it's they who're doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us,
actually. Did one of them cut your check, where it's been bleeding?"
"Yes," he said wanly.
"Will you go to bed now? If I set the mood organ to a 670 setting?"
"What does that bring about?" he asked.
"Long deserved peace," Iran said.

. Really weird. Sometimes it's better to do
something wrong than right."
"It's the curse on us," Iran said. "That Mercer talks about."
"The dust?" he asked.
"The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn't reverse time
and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes,
to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it's they

You were right this morning when you said I'm nothing but a crude cop with crude cop
hands."
"I don't feel that any more," she said. "I'm just damn glad to have you come back home where you
ought to be." She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before
- before she had shown him that the toad was electric.
"Do you think I did wrong?" he asked. "What I did today?
"No."

"After I finished. I couldn't stop because there would be nothing left after I
stopped.

"Once I began on it there wasn't any way for me
to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn't have
anything to do. And that - " He hesitated, evidently amazed at what he had begun to say. "That part
was worse," he said

s been a long day." He nodded.
"Go get into bed and sleep."
He stared at her, then, as if perplexed. "It is over, isn't it?" Trustingly he seemed to be waiting for
her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious
attitude toward his own words; they didn't become real, not until she agreed.
"It's over," she said.
"God, what a marathon assignment," Rick said.

Seating herself across from him she said, "What do you have in the box, Rick?

To rest and wash and tell about the miracles of the day.
"It's nice to see you," she said.
"I have something." He held a cardboard box with both hands; when he entered the apartment he
did not set it down. As if, she thought, it contained something too fragile and too valuable to let go of;
he wanted to keep it perpetually in his hands.

"Mercer isn't a fake," he said. "Unless reality is a fake." This hill, he thought. This dust and these
many stones, each one different from all the others. "I'm afraid," he said, "that I can't stop being
Mercer. Once you start it's too late to back off." Will I have to climb the hill again? he wondered.
Forever, as Mercer does . . . trapped by eternity. "Goodby," he said, and started to ring off

ything living up there near Oregon; isn't that right? Aren't you alone?"
"It's strange," Rick said. "I had the absolute, utter, completely real illusion that I had become
Mercer and people were lobbing rocks at me. But not the way you experience it when you hold the
handles of an empathy box. When you use an empathy box you feel you're with Mercer. The
difference is I wasn't with anyone; I was alone."

"Everything is true," he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought."

t's so awful. So needless."
He turned toward his parked car, opened the door, and got in behind the wheel. "Not needless,"
he said. "She had what seemed to her a reason." An android reason, he thought.
"Where are you going? Won't you come downstairs and be with me? There was the most
shocking news on TV; Buster Friendly claims that Mercer is a fake. What do you think about that,
Rick? Do you think it could be

"Maybe I shouldn't have told you - about it being electrical." She put her hand out, touched his
arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.
"No," Rick said. "I'm glad to know. Or rather - " He became silent. "I'd prefer to know."

If Rick were here, she thought, he'd
get me to dial 3 and that way I'd find myself wanting to dial something important, ebullient joy or if
not that then possibly an 888, the desire to watch TV no matter what's on it. I wonder what is on it,
she thought.

"Dial 888," Rick said as the set warmed. "The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it."
"I don't feel like dialing anything at all now," Iran said.
"Then dial 3," he said.
"I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial!