Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 14: The Vote
The three surviving androids are finally in one place. Roy and Irmgard Baty have arrived at the decaying apartment building where Pris has been hiding. And J. R. Isidore, the lonely chickenhead who has been looking after Pris, is standing right there listening to everything.
This chapter is basically a war council. But also something much more interesting than that.
The Body Count
Roy delivers the news fast and cold. Polokov is dead. Garland is dead. Luba is dead. Anders and Gitchel are gone too. Out of the original group that escaped Mars, only three remain. Roy, Irmgard, and Pris.
Here’s the thing about how Roy delivers this information. He seems to enjoy it. The worse the situation gets, the more energized he becomes. When he talks about Luba’s death, there’s almost a satisfaction in his voice. Not grief. Not anger. Something closer to “I told her so.” He warned Luba about being too public, performing opera right out in the open where anyone could find her. He warned Polokov about trying to impersonate a government agent. He warned Garland that his own people would get him.
Roy was right about all of them. And now they’re all dead. He’s the last strategist standing.
Setting Up Defenses
Roy doesn’t waste time on mourning. He starts working immediately. The plan is simple. Pris moves upstairs into Isidore’s apartment. Roy and Irmgard take an empty unit in the same building. Roy rigs up a two-way communication bug so all four of them can hear each other. And then he builds something more clever.
An alarm system with a built-in Penfield unit. If a stranger enters, the device broadcasts a massive wave of panic directly into their brain. Not a sound alarm. Not a light. Raw, overwhelming fear injected straight into the nervous system. The intruder loses motor control, starts running in random directions, can’t think straight.
It’s brutal and it’s elegant. Roy pulled the components off the ship they came on and cobbled this thing together in minutes. The guy moves fast. Isidore watches him blur through a doorway, so quick that for a moment he sees something else. A frame of metal, pulleys and circuits and gears. A machine underneath the human shape. Just a flash. Then Roy is Roy again.
That little hallucination is one of the best moments in the chapter. Isidore’s mind is already seeing through the disguise before he has the words for it.
The Big Reveal
And then the words come. Roy is explaining the alarm system, talking about how he calibrated it for “cephalic emanations,” and he slips. He says the word “human” when he should not have.
Isidore gets it. Just like that.
“You’re androids,” he says.
No drama, no screaming, no running for the door. He just says it. And then he says something that might be the most important line in the entire book.
“But what does it matter to me?”
This is a guy who society treats as subhuman. A “chickenhead,” someone who failed the intelligence test, someone who can’t emigrate, someone who other people avoid. He compares his own situation to theirs directly. You can’t come here. I can’t leave. We’re both stuck. We’re both treated as less than.
The androids don’t quite know what to do with this. Pris calls him a “great man” and a “credit to his race,” which sounds like a compliment but has a nasty edge to it. Roy says he’s “overwhelmed with admiration” in a tone that Isidore can’t decode at all. Is it sincere? Mocking? Both?
Only Irmgard seems genuinely moved. She tells Isidore directly that he could turn them in for a lot of money. She watches his face when she says it. He doesn’t even hesitate. And she turns to Roy and says, see? He wouldn’t do it. He knows and he still wouldn’t.
The Cruelty Problem
But even in this moment of acceptance, the androids can’t fully return what Isidore gives them. Pris had refused to live with him earlier in the chapter. “A chickenhead?” she said, disgusted. Roy’s response to learning the alarm will also blast Isidore with panic is a flat “Well, so what.” Isidore is useful to them as cover. That’s the calculation.
Irmgard is the exception. She’s the warmest of the three. She scolds Pris for being a snob. She thanks Isidore formally. She touches his arm. But even Irmgard is operating partly from practicality. They need a hiding place. They need a human face to put between them and the bounty hunter.
Pris tries to throw Isidore off earlier. She tells him that they’re all just escaped mental patients. Schizophrenics. Group hallucinations. No bounty hunters, no androids, just crazy people. And Isidore buys it for a second because it’s easier to believe. The government doesn’t kill people. Mercerism protects all life. These things can’t be true.
But Pris can’t quite resist poking at the logic. “Even animals are protected by law,” she says. “All life. Everything organic.” She’s practically begging him to hear the word she isn’t saying. What if you’re not organic?
Why This Chapter Matters
Philip K. Dick sets up a perfect mirror here. The bounty hunter, Rick Deckard, kills androids partly because he believes they lack empathy. The Voigt-Kampff test measures emotional responses. Androids fail it because they can’t feel the right things at the right time.
But look at this chapter. The androids are strategic, calculating, sometimes cruel. They use Isidore without much guilt. And yet the one person who shows real, deep, unconditional empathy is the guy society considers broken. The chickenhead. The special. The man with the lowest IQ in the building is the only one who can see past the label “android” and just see people who need help.
The chapter ends with Pris calling for a vote on whether to stay. Irmgard makes her case. If they turn this down, they won’t find another human willing to take them in. Isidore is, as Pris puts it, “special.”
She means it as a category. But she’s also accidentally telling the truth.