Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 19: The Final Hunt
This is the chapter where everything ends. Six androids in one day. And by the time it’s over, Rick Deckard has nothing left.
Isidore Says No
The chapter opens with Isidore standing in his apartment, gripping the handles of his empathy box. The lights go out. Irmgard and Pris are whispering at him from both sides, frantic, telling him what to do. Go to the door. Show your ID. Tell the bounty hunter nobody’s here. Ask for a warrant. Do anything.
Isidore goes downstairs and outside. He’s carrying the spider that Mercer gave him, the one that may or may not be the same spider Pris cut apart with cuticle scissors. He puts it down on a patch of half-dead weeds. Lets it go. A small, quiet act of kindness.
And then a flashlight hits the weeds. Rick Deckard is standing right there.
Rick shows his badge. Asks Isidore to take him upstairs and show him which apartment. There are over a thousand units in this building. Isidore could save him a lot of time.
But Isidore refuses. He tells Rick that if he kills the androids, he won’t be able to fuse with Mercer again. Rick tries legal threats, then just gives up. “Good night,” he says, and walks into the building alone.
Here’s the thing about Isidore in this moment. He knows they’re androids. He’s known for a while. And he still won’t betray them. He saw Pris cut a living spider apart for fun, and he’s still protecting her. That’s either the deepest form of empathy or the saddest kind of loyalty. Maybe both.
Mercer Appears
Rick is moving through the dark halls with detection equipment, searching floor by floor. And then someone is waiting for him in the shadows. Rick raises his laser tube, ready to fire.
But it’s not an android. It’s Mercer. Literally standing there in the hallway.
After the previous chapter where Buster Friendly proved that Mercer was a fraud, an actor on a soundstage, here he is. Real enough to speak. Real enough to point at the stairs behind Rick and say, “One of them is behind you and below. It will be the hard one. You must retire it first.”
I love that Dick does this. He spends an entire chapter dismantling Mercer as a hoax, and then he just shows up anyway, in person, to save Rick’s life. Fake or not, Mercer does something real in this moment. That’s the whole point.
The Hardest Kill
Rick spins around. A woman is coming up the stairs toward him. And for a second, he thinks it’s Rachael. Same face. Same eyes. His finger comes off the trigger.
Then he sees the clothes are wrong. And he understands. This is Pris Stratton. The Nexus-6 model that Rachael was based on, or the other way around. Same template. Different name. She reaches for him, saying, “For what we’ve meant to each other.” And she’s carrying a laser tube.
Rick fires. Pris shatters.
This is devastating for a reason that goes beyond the action. Rick just spent the night with Rachael. He has feelings for her. And now he’s shot someone who looks exactly like her. He even thinks about it clearly: there can be a legion of Rachaels, each with its own name, but all the same. The manufacturer uses this face, this body, as a weapon. And it almost worked.
If Mercer hadn’t warned him, Pris would have killed him right there on the stairs.
The Batys
Now Rick has to finish the job. He finds the apartment using his detection gear. Knocks on the door. And here he does something clever and a little cruel. He imitates Isidore’s voice. The stammer, the nervous speech patterns, the details about the Van Ness Pet Hospital and Buster Friendly. The door opens.
Inside, darkness. Two shapes.
Irmgard Baty tells him he needs to administer tests. Rick says it’s too late. Roy Baty fires a laser at him, misses, fires again, misses again, drops the weapon, and runs deeper into the apartment. Roy has passed the laser to Irmgard, hoping she can get Rick from behind.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Baty,” Rick says, and shoots her.
Roy Baty screams from the other room. A cry of real anguish. Or whatever androids have instead of anguish. At this point in the book, does the distinction even matter?
Rick says something that hits hard. “Okay, you loved her. And I loved Rachael. And the special loved the other Rachael.” Three different kinds of love, all tangled up with the same manufactured face.
Then he shoots Roy Baty. The big man’s body crashes into the kitchen table, taking dishes and flatware down with it. Reflex circuits make the corpse twitch and flutter, but it’s done. Roy Baty, the leader, the one who organized the escape from Mars, the one who wanted to live, is dead.
Six in One Day
Rick sits down on the couch. Six androids retired in a single day. Almost a record, he thinks. Now he can go home to Iran and the goat. They’ll have enough money, for once.
But there’s no triumph here. Zero. Rick is sitting in a dark apartment surrounded by dead androids, and all he feels is empty.
Isidore appears at the door. He saw Pris on the stairs. He’s crying. Rick tells him not to take it so hard. Then he finds a phone and calls his boss.
What gets me about this ending is how mechanical it is. Rick does the job. He sits down. He makes a phone call. Like a plumber who just finished a difficult installation. Except the plumber didn’t have to kill three beings who could think, feel fear, love each other, and beg for their lives.
What This Chapter Really Is
This is the climax of the entire novel, but Dick writes it like a man filling out paperwork. No dramatic music. No heroic last stand. Pris dies in a burst of parts. Irmgard gets an apology before the trigger pull. Roy screams once and falls into the kitchen table.
The whole book has been building toward the question of whether killing androids is murder. And this chapter answers it not with philosophy but with the quiet way Rick sits on that couch afterward. He’s won. He’s done his job. And he has absolutely nothing to show for it except money and exhaustion.
If you’ve seen Blade Runner, you know the movie gave Roy Baty a beautiful death scene. “Tears in rain” and all that. Dick’s version is the opposite. Roy dies mid-lunge, crashing into dishes. There’s no poetry in it. And that might be the more honest version.