Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 10: The Fake Police Station
Rick Deckard lands on the roof of the Mission Street Hall of Justice. It’s a fancy building, baroque spires, modern design, the works. There’s just one problem. He has never seen this building before in his life.
And he’s a cop. He should know every police station in the city.
Booked and Processed
Officer Crams drags Rick inside and starts booking him. The charges are ugly. Suspected homicide, impersonating a police officer, harassing a woman in her dressing room. They take his cephalic pattern for identification. They put him through the standard intake process.
Rick has been on the other side of this routine a thousand times. He used to be a harness bull himself. He knows how booking works. But this table, this room, these people, he has never seen any of them before.
His brain is working overtime. Two police agencies in the same city? Operating on the same streets? How is that possible? How have they never crossed paths until now?
Or maybe they have. And he just never heard about it.
The Phone Call
They let Rick make a phone call. Standard procedure. He dials home to reach Iran, his wife.
A stranger picks up.
Not Iran. Not his house. Some woman he has never seen before staring at him from the vidscreen. He hangs up and walks back slowly.
This is the moment where the floor starts to feel soft under your feet as a reader. Something is very wrong here. Not just a little wrong. Everything wrong. The building is wrong, the people are wrong, and now his own phone number connects to a stranger.
Inspector Garland
A plainclothes officer introduces himself as Garland. He’s calm, professional, curious about Rick in a detached kind of way. He goes through Rick’s briefcase, looks at the Voigt-Kampff materials, studies the assignment sheets.
Then he says something that stops everything cold.
“Those smudged carbon flimsies that you have there in your briefcase. Polokov, Miss Luft… your assignments. The next one is me.”
Rick grabs the briefcase and checks. Garland is right. Inspector Garland, the man sitting across the desk from him right now, is the next android on Rick’s retirement list. Listed as an insurance underwriter, but the physical description matches perfectly.
So here’s the situation. Rick is sitting in a police station he has never heard of, being detained by a man who is on his kill list.
That is not a good position to be in.
Phil Resch
Garland calls in one of his own bounty hunters, a guy named Phil Resch. Tall, thin, wears horn-rim glasses and a messy Vandyke beard. Garland wants to check if Rick appears on Resch’s android list.
But something interesting happens when Resch shows up. He looks at Rick’s assignment sheet, sees Garland’s name on it, and doesn’t dismiss it. Instead he starts thinking out loud. He mentions that he has always wanted to test Polokov, the Soviet cop Rick already retired. Polokov always struck him as cold. Cerebral. Calculating.
Garland gets angry. Really angry. He tries to spin the whole thing against Rick. This man is a fraud, a killer, probably an android himself. He carries a fake test. His list isn’t androids, it’s humans. He has already killed Polokov and would have killed Luft next.
Resch just says, “Hmm.”
You can tell that Resch is not buying the party line. He’s a professional. He’s been wanting to test people in his own department for years. He has been saying that their Boneli Reflex-Arc Test should be applied to all police personnel, especially the higher-ups. And Garland has always blocked it. Always said it would hurt morale.
The Lab Report
Then the lab report comes in over the intercom. The bone marrow analysis on Polokov’s body. And the result is clear. Polokov was a humanoid robot.
Garland just sits there. Silent. Staring at the wall.
This confirms everything. The man Rick killed was indeed an android. And the police inspector who is trying to lock Rick up for murder is himself on Rick’s android list. This entire police station is a construct. A parallel operation built by escaped androids to protect themselves.
Think about how clever that is. The best place for an android to hide is inside a police department. You control the investigation. You control the bounty hunters. You control who gets tested and who doesn’t. And if someone from the real department stumbles across your operation, you arrest them.
What Makes This Chapter Great
Philip K. Dick does something brilliant here. He takes the question “what is real?” and drops it directly onto institutions. Not just people, but the systems we trust. The police. The law. The bureaucracy that processes you when you walk through the door.
Rick knows police procedure. He knows how booking works. And that’s exactly what makes this so disorienting. Everything looks right but nothing is right. The forms are correct. The desk sergeant is bored in the right way. The holding room is familiar. But all of it is fake. A perfect copy of something real, operated by the very things it’s supposed to hunt.
And then there’s Phil Resch. A bounty hunter working inside this fake station who doesn’t seem to know it’s fake. He’s been doing his job, following orders, trusting his superiors. And now the ground is shifting under him too. He’s starting to ask questions that might get him killed.
The chapter ends on a knife edge. Polokov is confirmed android. Garland is on the list. Resch wants to start testing people. And Rick is sitting right in the middle of an android operation with no backup and no way to call home.