Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 2: The Last Man Standing
Chapter 1 gave us Rick Deckard and his cranky morning. Chapter 2 flips the camera entirely. We meet John Isidore, and honestly, he might be the most important character in this whole book.
A TV Talking to Nobody
The chapter opens with one of the best opening images in sci-fi. A giant, decaying apartment building that once housed thousands of people. Now it’s empty. And a TV set is blasting ads into an uninhabited room.
Just sit with that for a second. A TV selling stuff to no one. If that’s not a perfect image of the world after nuclear war, I don’t know what is.
Philip K. Dick uses this moment to fill us in on what happened. World War Terminus wrecked everything. First the owls died. Then the other birds. Then people figured out the radioactive dust was killing the planet. So the UN started a colonization program. Move to Mars, get a free android servant. Stay on Earth, risk getting classified as “special,” which means your genes are damaged and you’re basically removed from the human race.
The carrot was the android. The stick was the fallout. Most people took the deal.
Meet John Isidore
But not everyone left. John Isidore is one of the people who stayed. And he’s not just a regular person who chose to remain. He’s a “special,” someone whose brain has been damaged by radiation. In popular slang, a chickenhead. He failed the minimum mental faculties test, and because of that, three planets look down on him.
Here’s what I find interesting about Isidore. Dick doesn’t write him as stupid. He writes him as someone who thinks differently, who feels deeply, who is aware of his own situation. Isidore knows the TV ads aren’t for him. He knows he can’t emigrate even if he wanted to. And he has this bitter little moment where he thinks, “I hope a war starts on Mars and everybody who left turns out to be special too.”
That’s not a dumb guy. That’s someone who’s been told he’s worthless and is quietly angry about it.
He works as a pickup driver for a fake animal repair shop, which is a great detail. His boss, Hannibal Sloat, accepts him as human. And Isidore appreciates that. When being seen as a person is a gift someone gives you, that tells you everything about the world you’re living in.
The Silence
Then Isidore turns off the TV. And here Dick writes one of the most powerful passages in the book. The silence doesn’t just appear. It attacks. It oozes from the broken appliances, rises from the carpet, pours from the ceiling. It’s alive. It’s hungry. And it has basically won.
I work in IT. I’ve sat alone in server rooms at 2 AM. I know what a big empty space sounds like. But Dick takes that feeling and turns it into something almost supernatural. The silence isn’t just the absence of sound. It’s the presence of emptiness. The entire building, a thousand apartments with nobody in them, pressing in on this one guy.
This is the moment where you understand why Isidore needs the empathy box.
Mercerism and the Empathy Box
So Isidore grabs the handles of his empathy box, and we finally get to see what Mercerism actually is. When you grip the handles, you merge with Wilbur Mercer, an old man climbing a barren hill. Rocks get thrown at him. He gets hurt. But here’s the thing: you’re not alone in there. Everyone else who’s holding the handles at the same time is there with you. You feel them. They feel you.
The pain is real, by the way. When a rock hits Mercer’s arm, Isidore’s actual arm starts bleeding. He has to wash the wound afterward. People have died during the experience, especially elderly ones during the worst parts of the climb.
And Isidore does it anyway. He always does.
We also get Mercer’s backstory. Found as a child floating on a raft. He could bring dead animals back to life. But “the killers” caught him, destroyed the special part of his brain with radioactive cobalt, and he fell into a world of corpses and bones. Eventually the dead things grew back to life and he started climbing again.
It’s weird, mythical, almost biblical. And Dick never fully explains it. He just lets it sit there, this strange religion built around shared suffering and the idea that you keep climbing even when rocks hit you. Even when you can’t see the top.
A New Neighbor
Then something incredible happens. Isidore hears a TV from another apartment. Someone has moved in. In a world where people only leave, someone arrived.
He’s so excited he can barely think straight. He grabs a cube of margarine from his broken fridge and rushes down the hall to introduce himself. But even in this moment of joy, there’s fear. He thinks, “I have to keep calm. Not let him know I’m a chickenhead. If he finds out I’m a chickenhead he won’t talk to me.”
That last line hit me hard. Here’s a man so lonely that he lives in a thousand-unit building completely alone, and when he finally gets a neighbor, his first thought is terror that he’ll be rejected for who he is.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter 2 does something clever. It gives us the emotional core of the book before the plot kicks in. Rick Deckard will hunt androids. But Isidore is the one asking the real question: what does it mean to be considered less than human? And if the world treats you like you don’t matter, where do you find connection?
The answer, for now, is Mercerism. Shared pain. Collective climbing.
Also, there’s a word introduced here that I love: kipple. It’s the idea that useless junk accumulates and multiplies when nobody’s around to stop it. Every apartment slowly filling with pudding-like kipple until the whole building collapses into shapelessness. It’s entropy given a name. And it’s one of those Dick inventions that sticks in your brain because it’s so obviously true. Look at any abandoned building. Kipple wins.
Tomorrow we’ll get back to Rick Deckard and the assignment that’s about to ruin his day. But I wanted to sit with Isidore for a bit. In a book full of people questioning what’s real and what’s fake, he might be the most genuinely human character of them all.