Resch shoots Garland in the head, escaping with Deckard back to the opera singer, whom Resch brutally kills in cold blood when she alludes that he himself may be an android. Garland, pointing a gun at Deckard, then reveals that the entire station is a sham, claiming that both he and Phil Resch, the station's resident bounty hunter, are androids. After a series of mysterious revelations at the station, Deckard ponders the ethical and philosophical questions his line of work raises regarding android intelligence, empathy and what it means to be human. An official named Garland accuses Deckard himself of being an android with implanted memories. Failing to recognize Deckard as a bounty hunter, the cops arrest and detain him at a police station he has never heard of, filled with officers whom he is surprised to have never met. Meeting her backstage, Deckard attempts to administer the empathy test but she calls the police. Deckard kills the android, then flies off to kill his next target, an android living in disguise as an opera singer. The Rosen Association attempts to blackmail Deckard to get him to drop the case, but Deckard retests Rachael and determines that Rachael is, indeed, an android, which she ultimately admits.ĭeckard soon meets a Soviet police contact who turns out to be one of the Nexus-6 renegades in disguise. Deckard suspects the test may not be capable of distinguishing the latest Nexus-6 models from genuine human beings, and it appears to give a false positive on his host in Seattle, Rachael Rosen, meaning the police have potentially been executing human beings. Deckard visits the Rosen Association's headquarters in Seattle to confirm the accuracy of the latest empathy test meant to identify incognito androids. Deckard hopes this mission will earn him enough bounty money to buy a live animal to replace his lone electric sheep to comfort his depressed wife Iran. These androids are made of organic matter so similar to a human's that only a posthumous " bone marrow analysis" can independently prove the difference, making them almost impossible to distinguish from real people. Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department, is assigned to "retire" (kill) six androids of the new and highly intelligent Nexus-6 model which have recently escaped from Mars and traveled to Earth. Acquiring high-status animal pets and linking in to empathy boxes appear to be the only two ways characters in the story strive for existential fulfillment. The trend of increased empathy has coincidentally motivated a new technology-based religion called Mercerism, which uses "empathy boxes" to link users simultaneously to a virtual reality of collective suffering, centered on a martyr-like character, Wilbur Mercer, who eternally climbs up a hill while being hit with crashing stones. Rick Deckard, the novel's protagonist, for example, owns an electric black-faced sheep. However, poor people can only afford realistic-looking robot imitations of live animals. On Earth, owning real live animals has become a fashionable status symbol, both because mass extinctions have made authentic animals rare and because of the accompanying cultural push for greater empathy. As a result, American and Soviet police departments remain vigilant and keep android bounty-hunting officers on duty. The Rosen Association manufactures the androids on a colony on Mars, but some androids violently rebel and escape to Earth, where they hope to remain undetected. Moving away from Earth comes with the incentive of free personal androids: robot servants identical to humans. In 1992 (2021 in later editions) following a devastating global war called World War Terminus, the Earth's radioactively polluted atmosphere leads the United Nations to encourage mass emigrations to off-world colonies to preserve humanity's genetic integrity.
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