Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 18: Mercerism Exposed
This chapter is one of the most disturbing in the entire book. Not because of violence or action. Because of a spider.
The Big Night
The androids are excited. Genuinely, visibly excited. They’ve been waiting for this broadcast for months. Buster Friendly, the nonstop TV host who fills every second of airtime with his show, is about to drop what he calls a world-shaking discovery.
Isidore gets sent downstairs to fetch a TV set. He doesn’t mind. He’s happy to be useful, happy to be needed, happy to have people around him in this crumbling apartment building where he used to be completely alone. He carries the TV up, plugs it in, and goes back down for the rest of Pris’s stuff.
On the stairs, he finds something incredible. A spider. A real, living spider.
In this world, finding any living creature is like finding gold. Everyone carries little plastic bottles for exactly this moment. Isidore scoops up the spider and practically floats back upstairs. He’s holding life in his hands. Real, fragile, rare life.
He walks in and says, “I found a spider.”
The androids barely look up.
The Exposure
Buster Friendly’s big reveal rolls out like a true crime documentary. His research team analyzed the empathy box videos of Mercer climbing his hill. The sky behind him? Painted. You can see brush strokes under magnification. The rocks thrown at him? Soft plastic. The blood? Ketchup.
And Mercer himself? A drunk, washed-up bit player named Al Jarry. Some old man in Indiana who filmed a few cheap fifteen-minute videos for money and whisky. He never knew who hired him. He never cared.
The androids are thrilled. Roy Baty sits on the edge of his seat. Irmgard’s eyes are wide. This is their victory. Because Mercerism was the one thing that separated humans from androids. Empathy, the shared fusion experience, the feeling of climbing together, suffering together. That was the proof that humans were real and androids were not.
And now it turns out the whole thing was built on a soundstage by a nobody from Hollywood.
Irmgard says it out loud. Mercerism was just a way for humans to prove they could do something androids couldn’t. Without the Mercer experience, all you have is someone’s word that they feel empathy. Just words. No proof.
And then Pris casually reveals that Buster Friendly himself is an android. Nobody knows. No humans, anyway.
The Spider
Here’s what happened while the broadcast was running.
Pris took the spider from Isidore and started wondering out loud why it needed so many legs. Eight seemed like too many. Irmgard agreed, suggested cutting four off, and handed Pris a pair of cuticle scissors.
Pris started cutting.
One leg. Then another. Then another. The spider crept around on the kitchen table looking for a way out. There wasn’t one. Isidore begged her to stop. She smiled and kept going.
I’ve read this scene three times now and it still makes my stomach turn. Not because it’s graphic. It’s actually written very simply. What makes it horrible is the casualness. Pris is curious, the way a kid might be curious about what happens when you pull wings off a fly. Except she’s not a child. She’s an intelligent being making a conscious choice to inflict pain on something helpless.
Roy Baty comes in after the broadcast ends, sees the four-legged spider won’t move, and lights a match to force it to walk. Just to see if it can.
Isidore pushes Pris away, takes the spider to the sink, and drowns it. A mercy killing. And something inside him drowns too.
Mercer Appears Anyway
What follows is one of the strangest and most beautiful scenes in the book.
Isidore enters a kind of vision. The apartment collapses around him. The walls crack, the floor sags, bones and animal remains fill the room. He’s back in the tomb world, the wasteland he enters through the empathy box. But this time he didn’t use the box. He’s just there.
And then the mutilated spider crawls across his foot. Alive again. With all its legs restored.
Mercer appears. The same old man from the empathy box. The one who was just exposed as a fraud on live television.
Isidore asks him directly. Is the sky painted? Are the brush strokes real?
“Yes,” Mercer says. All of it is true. The research was genuine. He really is Al Jarry. He really is a retired bit player. He really did drink too much whisky.
“I am a fraud,” Mercer says.
But then he adds something that changes everything. The androids have better perspective because they’re far away. They can see the brush strokes. They can see the painted sky. But Isidore is too close. He’s inside the experience. And from inside, the experience is real.
Mercer tells Isidore that nothing has changed. “You’re still here and I’m still here.” The exposure doesn’t matter. The facts don’t matter. What matters is the connection, the act of climbing together, the choice to feel something for someone else.
Why This Is the Heart of the Book
Philip K. Dick is doing something really clever here. He’s running two scenes side by side. In one, a religion is exposed as fake, and the androids celebrate because empathy was the barrier they could never cross. In the other, an android casually tortures a living creature while a “chickenhead” is destroyed by watching it happen.
Who has empathy in this scene? Not the androids who are overjoyed that the empathy test is meaningless. Not Buster Friendly, who is himself an android. The one being with empathy is Isidore, the guy society calls broken.
And here’s the real twist. Mercer admits he’s fake. The sky is painted. Al Jarry is real. But the experience of Mercerism, the actual connection between people, is also real. Both things are true at the same time. The fraud is genuine. The fake is real.
Dick wrote this in 1968. Today we argue about what’s real and what’s manufactured, what’s authentic and what’s AI-generated, what’s true and what just feels true. This chapter hits differently now than it probably did back then.
The chapter ends with an alarm bell. Roy Baty snarls that a bounty hunter is in the building. The lights go off. The moment of philosophy is over.
Now it’s survival time.