Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 16: The Hotel Room
This is the chapter where everything gets personal. Not in an action movie way. In a quiet, bourbon-soaked, morally confusing hotel room kind of way.
Reading the Files
Rick is sitting alone in a fancy hotel room, going through the dossiers on the three remaining androids. Roy Baty, Irmgard Baty, and someone called Pris Stratton.
The file on Roy Baty is not comforting. A pharmacist on Mars, or at least that was his cover story. In reality, probably a field laborer who wanted something better. But here’s the interesting part. The report says Baty organized the whole escape from Mars. He justified it with some ideology about the “sacredness of android life.” He even stole mind-fusing drugs, trying to create a group experience for androids similar to Mercerism.
Think about that. An android who wanted so badly to feel what humans feel through Mercer that he turned to drugs. And when that didn’t work, he turned to murder and escape.
Rick reads all this and feels something he hasn’t felt before in this story. Fear. Real, admitted fear of Roy Baty. The worst of the eight is still out there, and now Rick has to go find him.
Rachael Arrives
The hotel door bangs open. Rachael Rosen walks in wearing a fish-scale coat, carrying a bottle of pre-war bourbon. Not synthetic stuff. Real bourbon, from before the nuclear dust turned everything gray. Worth a fortune.
She’s breezy at first, commenting on the nice room, checking her watch. But Rick is all business. He hands her the files on the remaining three androids.
And then something shifts. Rachael reads the file on Pris Stratton, goes pale, and tosses the papers down. She walks to the window and stares out at San Francisco. Her voice shakes.
Rick can’t figure out what’s wrong. He asks, she dodges. She suggests they open the bourbon. He opens it, pours two glasses, and asks again.
The Revelation
Rachael finally says it. Pris Stratton is the same model as her. Same Nexus-6 type. Same face, same body, same everything. Maybe Pris wears her hair differently or dresses differently. But when Rick sees Pris, he’ll be looking at Rachael.
This hits like a truck, even if Dick delivers it in a quiet, almost offhand way.
Rachael is genuinely upset. She says something that stopped me cold: “We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I, personally, really exist. I’m just representative of a type.”
That’s an existential crisis in two sentences. Imagine finding out there’s an exact copy of you walking around, and you can’t even claim to be the original, because neither of you is. You’re both just units off a production line.
Rick tries to comfort her. He mentions ants, identical twins. Rachael isn’t having it. She pours more bourbon and drinks fast.
Things Get Complicated
What follows is one of the strangest seduction scenes I’ve ever read. Rachael drinks, gets unsteady, and starts undressing. But in between, she keeps talking, and what she says is sharp.
She tells Rick the real reason the Rosen Association sent her. It wasn’t just to help him hunt Nexus-6 androids. It was to observe what gives them away on the Voigt-Kampff test, so the next generation can be built without those tells. The Nexus-7 won’t be detectable. And the one after that will be even better.
She delivers this information while kicking off her boots. It’s half confession, half taunt. Rick notices the shift too. She goes from feeling sorry for herself to poking at him.
She also tells him about a device in her purse, a small metallic sphere that can freeze an android’s autonomic nervous system for five or six seconds. Enough time for Rick to use his laser. A weapon against Roy Baty, if it comes to that.
But mostly, Rachael wants to make a deal.
The Deal
Rick is standing by the bed, fully aware of what’s happening, and he almost walks away. Not because of Rachael. Because of Pris Stratton. He knows that later tonight, he’ll have to point his laser at someone who looks exactly like the person he’s about to sleep with.
Phil Resch’s advice from earlier in the book echoes in his head: go to bed with her first, then kill her.
“I can’t do it,” Rick says, and steps back from the bed.
But Rachael makes an offer. Sleep with her, and she’ll retire Pris Stratton herself. She’ll take that burden off Rick’s shoulders. Because she knows he’ll hesitate when he sees that face. Her face.
It’s a manipulative offer. It’s also maybe a sincere one. With Rachael, you can never be sure. That’s the whole point.
Rick does the math. If Rachael handles Pris, he only has to retire the two Batys. The fear of Roy Baty is eating at him. He accepts.
“Goddamn it, get into bed,” Rachael says.
He gets into bed.
What’s Really Going On
This chapter is doing about five things at once. On the surface, it’s Rick and Rachael finally giving in to the tension that’s been building since they first met at the Rosen Association. But under that, it’s a web of manipulation, fear, loneliness, and maybe something that looks like love if you squint.
Rachael says “I love you” at one point, and follows it with: “If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I’d score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.” Is that a joke? Is it genuine emotion expressed the only way an android can? Is it a calculated move to make Rick hesitate when he faces the remaining three?
I honestly don’t know. And I think Dick wants it that way.
What I do know is that Rick walked into this hotel room as a bounty hunter with three targets. He’s going to walk out of it as something else. A man who slept with an android, who accepted help from one, who admitted his own fear out loud. The clean professional is long gone.
Three androids left. And the worst one is waiting.