Philip Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“How’ll you kill yourself without it?” Rick asked. “If you fail on the test?

“I’ll hold my breath.”

“Chrissake,” Rick said. “It can’t be done.”

“There’s no automatic cut-in of the vagus nerve,” Phil Resch said, “in an android. As there is in a human. Weren’t you taught that when they trained you? I got taught that years ago.”

“But to die that way,” Rick protested.

“There’s no pain. What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s—” He gestured. Unable to find the right words.

“I don’t really think I’m going to have to,” Phil Resch said.

Together they ascended to the roof of the War Memorial Opera House and Phil Resch’s parked hovercar.

Sliding behind the wheel and closing his door, Phil Resch said, “I would prefer it if you used the Boneli test.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how to score it.” I would have to rely on you for an interpretation of the readings, he realized. And that’s out of the question.

“You’ll tell me the truth, won’t you?” Phil Resch asked. “If I’m an android you’ll tell me?”

“Sure.”

“Because I really want to know. I have to know.” Phil Resch relit his cigar, shifted about on the bucket seat of the car, trying to make himself comfortable. Evidently he could not. “Did you really like that Munch picture that Luba Luft was looking at?” he asked. “I didn’t care for it. Realism in art doesn’t interest me; I like Picasso and—”

“ Puberty dates from 1894,” Rick said shortly. “Nothing but realism existed then; you have to take that into account.”

“But that other one, of the man holding his ears and yelling—that wasn’t representational.”

Opening his briefcase, Rick fished out his test gear.

“Elaborate,” Phil Resch observed, watching. “How many questions do you have to ask before you can make a determination?”

“Six or seven.” He handed the adhesive pad to Phil Resch.

“Attach that to your cheek. Firmly. And this light—” He aimed it. “This stays focused on your eye. Don’t move; keep your eyeball as steady as you can.”

“Reflex fluctuations,” Phil Resch said acutely. “But not to the physical stimulus; you’re not measuring dilation, for instance. It’ll be to the verbal questions; what we call a flinch reaction.”

Rick said, “Do you think you can control it?”

“Not really. Eventually, maybe. But not the initial amplitude; that’s outside conscious control. If it weren’t—” He broke off. “Go ahead. I’m tense; excuse me if I talk too much.”

“Talk all you want,” Rick said. Talk all the way to the tomb, he said to himself. If you feel like it. It didn’t matter to him.

“If I test out android,” Phil Resch prattled, “you’ll undergo renewed faith in the human race. But, since it’s not going to work out that way, I suggest you begin framing an ideology which will account for—”

“Here’s the first question,” Rick said; the gear had now been set up and the needles of the two dials quivered. “Reaction time is a factor, so answer as rapidly as you can.” From memory he selected an initial question. The test had begun.

Afterward, Rick sat in silence for a time. Then he began gathering his gear together, stuffing it back in the briefcase.

“I can tell by your face,” Phil Resch said; he exhaled in absolute, weightless, almost convulsive relief. “Okay; you can give me my gun back.” He reached out, his palm up, waiting.

“Evidently you were right,” Rick said. “About Garland’s motives. Wanting to split us up; what you said.” He felt both psychologically and physically weary.

“Do you have your ideology framed?” Phil Resch asked. “That would explain me as part of the human race?”

Rick said, “There is a defect in your empathic, role-taking ability. One which we don’t test for. Your feelings toward androids.”

“Of course we don’t test for that.”

“Maybe we should.” He had never thought of it before, had never felt any empathy on his own part toward the androids he killed. Always fie had assumed that throughout his psyche he experienced the android as a clever machine—as in his conscious view. And yet, in contrast to Phil Resch, a difference had manifested itself. And he felt instinctively that he was right. Empathy toward an artificial construct? he asked himself. Something that only pretends to be alive? But Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of a simulation.

“You realize,” Phil Resch said quietly, “what this would do. If we included androids in our range of empathic identification, as we do animals.”

“We couldn’t protect ourselves.”

“Absolutely. These Nexus-6 types … they’d roll all over us and mash us flat. You and I, all the bounty hunters—we stand between the Nexus-6 and mankind, a barrier which keeps the two distinct. Furthermore—” He ceased, noticing that Rick was once again hauling out his test gear. “I thought the test was over.”

“I want to ask myself a question,” Rick said. “And I want you to tell me what the needles register. Just give me the calibration; I can compute it.” He plastered the adhesive disk against his cheek, arranged the beam of light until it fed directly into his eye. “Are you ready? Watch the dials. We’ll exclude time lapse in this; I just want magnitude.”

“Sure, Rick,” Phil Resch said obligingly.

Aloud, Rick said, “I’m going down by elevator with an android I’ve captured. And suddenly someone kills it, without warning.”

“No particular response,” Phil Resch said.

“What’d the needles hit?”

“The left one 2.8. The right one 3.3”

Rick said, “A female android.”

“Now they’re up to 4.0 and 6. respectively.”

“That’s high enough,” Rick said; he removed the wired adhesive disk from his cheek and shut off the beam of light. “That’s an emphatically empathic response,” he said. “About what a human subject shows for most questions. Except for the extreme ones, such as those dealing with human pelts used decoratively … the truly pathological ones.”

“Meaning?”

Rick said, “I’m capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids. Not for all of them but—one or two.” For Luba Luft, as an example, he said to himself. So I was wrong. There’s nothing unnatural or unhuman about Phil Resch’s reactions; it’s me .

I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.

Of course, he reflected, this may never come up again in my work; it could be an anomaly, something for instance to do with my feelings for The Magic Flute . And for Luba’s voice, in fact her career as a whole. Certainly this had never come up before; or at least not that he had been aware of. Not, for example, with Polokov. Nor with Garland. And, he realized, if Phil Resch had proved out android I could have killed him without feeling anything, anyhow after Luba’s death.

So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs. In that elevator at the museum, he said to himself, I rode down with two creatures, one human, the other android … and my feelings were the reverse of those intended. Of those I’m accustomed to feel—am required to feel.

“You’re in a spot, Deckard,” Phil Resch said; it seemed to amuse him.

Rick said, “What—should I do?”

“It’s sex,” Phil Resch said.

“Sex?

“Because she—it—was physically attractive. Hasn’t that ever happened to you before?” Phil Resch laughed. “We were taught that it constitutes a prime problem in bounty hunting. Don’t you know, Deckard, that in the colonies they have android mistresses?”