"Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep"

[fiefoe]

Phillip K. Dick's obsession with "real humans" seems really quaint today.

A TURTLE WHICH EXPLORER CAPTAIN COOK GAVE TO THE KING OF TONGA IN 1777 DIED YESTERDAY. IT WAS NEARLY 200 YEARS OLD. THE ANIMAL, CALLED TU'IMALILA, DIED AT THE ROYAL PALACE GROUND IN THE TONGAN CAPITAL OF NUKU, ALOFA.
THE PEOPLE OF TONGA REGARDED THE ANIMAL AS A CHIEF AND SPECIAL KEEPERS WERE APPOINTED TO LOOK AFTER IT. IT WAS BLINDED IN A BUSH FIRE A FEW YEARS AGO. -1966

• 'My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,' Iran said.
  'What? Why did you schedule that?' It defeated the whole purpose of the mood organ. '
• that awful commercial came on, the one I hate; you know, for Mountibank Lead Codpieces.
• But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it 'absence of appropriate affect.' So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.' Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth.
• 'Dial 888,' Rick said as the set warmed. 'The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it.'
• * There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgment of husband's superior wisdom in all matters.
• * Nothing could be more impolite. To say, 'Is your sheep genuine?' would be a worse breach of manners than to inquire whether a citizen's teeth, hair, or internal organs would test out authentic.
• Didn't you see that article about his duck in yesterday's Chronicle? It's supposed to be the heaviest, largest Moscovy on the West Coast.' The man's eyes glazed over, imagining such possessions;
• 'But,' Rick interrupted, 'for you to have two horses and me none, that violates the whole basic theological and moral structure of Mercerism.'
  'You have your sheep; hell, you can follow the Ascent in your individual life, and when you grasp the two handles of empathy you approach honorably. Now if you didn't have that old sheep, there, I'd see some logic in your position. Sure, if I had two animals and you didn't have any, I'd be helping deprive you of true fusion with Mercer.
• it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel, the Rand Corporation
• The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats.
• That had been the ultimate incentive of emigration: the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as stick... Loitering on Earth potentially meant finding oneself abruptly classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race.
• He had been a special now for over a year, and not merely in regard to the distorted genes which he carried. Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of three planets descended... there existed chickenheads infinitely stupider than Isidore, who could hold no jobs at all, who remained in custodial institutions quaintly called 'Institute of Special Trade Skills of America,' the word 'special' having to get in there somehow, as always.
• * Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it - the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; 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.
• But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. 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.
• For one thing, the emphatic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider's ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve. <> Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimatley, the emphatic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world.
• '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.' ... 'It's artificial,' he said, with sudden realization; his disappointment welled up keen and intense.
• 'But I hunt them,' he said. 'This way, with a reversion clause on the owl, someone would be hunting me.' And he did not like the idea of being stalked; he had seen the effect on androids. It brought about certain notable changes, even in them.
• 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 maybe she doesn't know how to cook, he thought suddenly. Okay, I can do it; I'll fix dinner for both of us. And I'll show her how so she can do it in the future if she wants. She'll probably want to, once I show her how; as near as I can make out, most women, even young ones like her, like to cook: it's an instinct.
• He gave up; the false cat had ceased functioning, so evidently the short - if that was what ailed the thing - had finished off the power supply and basic drive-train. That'll run into money, he thought pessimistically. Well, the guy evidently hadn't been getting the three-times-yearly preventive cleaning and lubricating, which made all the difference.
• Nothing depressed him more than the moments in which he contrasted his current mental powers with what he had formerly possessed. Every day he declined in sagacity and vigor. He and the thousands of other specials throughout Terra, all of them moving toward the ash heap. Turning into living Ripple.
• Setting down his weapons kit he fumbled it open, got out a nondirectional Penfield wave transmitter; he punched the key for catalepsy, himself protected against the mood emanation by means of a counterwave broadcast through the transmitter's metal hull directed to him alone.
• 'Without me,' Rachael said, 'one of them will get you before you can get it.' <> 'Good-by,' he said and hung up. What kind of world is it, he asked himself, when an android phones up a bounty hunter and offers him assistance?
• _Könnte jedar brave Mann solche Glöckchen finden, eine Feinde würden dann ohne Muhe schwinden.
  Well, Rick thought, in real life no such magic bells exist that make your enemy effortlessly disappear. Too bad. And Mozart, not long after writing The Magic Flute, had died in his thirties
• the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake.
• * 'Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?'
  'An android,' he said, 'doesn't care what happens to any other android. That's one of the indications we look for.'
  'Then,' Miss Luft said, 'you must be an android.'
• * In a moment the carbons lay spread out before him. Garland had told the truth; Rick examined the sheet. Neither man - or rather neither he nor Garland - spoke for a time and then Garland cleared his throat, coughed nervously.
  'It's an unpleasant sensation,' he said. 'To find yourself a bounty hunter's assignment all of a sudden.
• 'You androids,' Rick said, 'don't exactly cover for each other in times of stress.' Garland snapped, 'I think you're right; it would seem we lack a specific talent you humans possess. I believe it's called empathy.'
• Scream: At an oil painting Phil Resch halted, gazed intently. The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl.
• 'My own money,' Rick said; he handed the woman the bills and Luba the book. 'Now let's get started down,' he said to her and Phil Resch.
  'It's very nice of you,' Luba said as they entered the elevator. 'There's something very strange and touching about humans. An android would never have done that.' She glanced icily at Phil Resch. 'It wouldn't have occurred to him; as he said, never in a million years.' She continued to gaze at Resch, now with manifold hostility and aversion. 'I really don't like androids. Ever since I got here from Mars my life has consisted of imitating the human, doing what she would do, acting as if I had the thoughts and impulses a human would have. Imitating, as far as I'm concerned, a superior life form.'
• With his laser tube, Rick systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba. He did the job thoroughly, saying nothing; Phil Resch watched without understanding, his face showing his perplexity.
• 'Sure it's illegal. But most variations in sex are illegal. But people do it anyhow.'
• * Anyhow, there's a fortune to be made in smuggling precolonial 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. What Mars ought to be like. Canals.'
• * You're out at night bumbling across the open space, and all of a sudden you see a flare, and there's a rocket, cracked open, with old pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. A fortune. But of course you read them before you sell them.'
• I bet Roy is right; I bet he has our names but no location. Poor Luba; stuck in the War Memorial Opera House, right out in the open. No difficulty finding her.'
• The animal salesman said, 'The distinct advantage of a goat is that it can be taught to butt anyone who tries to steal it.'
• * 'To show you,' Wilbur Mercer said, 'that you aren't alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it's wrong.'
  'Why?' Rick said. 'Why should I do it? I'll quit my job and emigrate.'
  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.
• In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids.
• The stance, he reflected, of a wary hunter of perhaps the Cro-Magnon persuasion. The race of tall hunters, he said to himself. No excess flesh, a flat belly, small behind and smaller bosom -Rachael had been modeled on the Celtic type of build, anachronistic and attractive,
• And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It's an illusion that I - I - personary really exist; I'm just representative of a type.' She shuddered. <> He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose.
• 'On the test or otherwise. Everything that gives it a different quality. And then I report back and the association makes modifications of its zygote-bath DNS factors. And we then have the Nexus-7. And when that gets caught we modify it again and eventually the association has a type that can't be distinguished.'
  'Do you know of the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test?' he asked.
  'We're working on the spinal ganglia, too. Someday the Boneli test will fade into yesterday's hoary shroud of spiritual oblivion.' She smiled innocuously - at variance with her words. At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance, yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait, possibly, he thought. No emotional awareness, no feeling-sense of the actual meaning of what she said.
• Anyhow, you know the truth, the brick-hard, irregular, slithery surface of truth. I'm just an observer and I won't intervene to save you; I don't care if Roy Baty nails you or not. I care whether I get nailed.' She opened her eyes round and wide. 'Christ, I'm empathic about myself
• He began hunting through the purse. Like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse;
• 'Remember, though: don't think about it, just do it. Don't pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary. For us both.' <> He said, 'Afterward I still intend to look for Roy Baty. I still need you to be there. I know that laser tube you have in your purse is - '
• * Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it - could never have reconciled itself to.
  'I can't stand the way you androids give up,' he said savagely.
• 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.
• He lingered, warming himself at the hearth of their presence.
• * 'All those legs. Why's it need so many legs, J.R.?' 'That's the way spiders are,' Isidore said, his heart pounding; he had difficulty breathing. 'Eight legs.' Rising to her feet, Pris said, 'You know what I think, J.R.? I think it doesn't need all those legs.'
• The TV set continued, 'The 'moon' is painted; in the enlargements, one of which you see now on your screen, brushstrokes show. And there is even some evidence that the scraggly weeds and dismal, sterile soil - perhaps even the stones hurled at Mercer by unseen alleged parties - are equally faked... 'In other words,' Buster Friendly broke in, 'Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all.'
• 'No, it's that empathy,' Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. 'Isn't it a way of proving that humans can do something we can't do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing.
• Horrified, he discovered he had forgotten the name. ' - a pet hospital,' he said. 'The Van Ness Pet Hospital,' he said. 'Owned b-b-by Hannibal Sloat.' Deckard said, 'Will you take me up there and show me which apartment they're in? There're over a thousand separate apartments; you can save me a lot of time.' His voice dipped with fatigue. 'If you kill them you won't be able to fuse with Mercer again,' Isidore said. 'You won't take me up there? Show me which floor? Just tell me the floor.
• 'It didn't get sick. Someone' - Iran cleared her throat and went on huskily - 'someone came here, got the goat out of its cage, and dragged it to the edge of the roof.' <> 'And pushed it off?' he said.
• a poisonous taste resembling defeat; yes, he thought, that's what it is: I've been defeated in some obscure way. By having killed the androids? By Rachael's murder of my goat? He did not know, but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind;
• '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.
• They're extinct! he said to himself; swiftly he dragged out his much-creased Sidney's, turned the pages with twitching fingers. TOAD (Bufonidae), all varieties . . . . . . . . . . . . . E. Extinct for years now. The critter most precious to Wilbur Mercer, along with the donkey. But toads most of all. <> I need a box.
• * 'The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn't matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.'