Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 21: Becoming Mercer
This chapter feels like a dream. Not a nice dream. The kind where you’re walking somewhere and you can’t remember why, and everything around you is wrong but you keep going anyway.
The Wasteland
Rick flies north. Way north, past San Francisco, past civilization, into the dead zone near Oregon. Early morning. The land below him is gray and empty. Rocks the size of houses just sitting there. Once, things grew here. Animals grazed. Now it’s a shipping room after all the goods have left. Nothing but packaging material.
He’s exhausted. He just retired six androids in twenty-four hours. Nobody has ever done that. He should feel like a champion. But Rick doesn’t feel like a champion. He feels like someone who broke something inside himself and can’t figure out what it was.
He lands his hovercar on a hillside, badly. The car tumbles and skids across rocks before stopping. He tries to call Dave Holden at the hospital. Dave would understand. Dave was the best bounty hunter before Rick, the one who got shot by Polokov at the start of all this. But Dave can’t take calls. His condition is too bad.
So Rick is alone. Really, truly alone. In a dead landscape where nothing lives.
Climbing the Hill
He gets out of the car. The air is cold and foul. He starts walking uphill. And with each step, things get stranger.
The heat rises. He’s hungry. He’s been awake for god knows how long. A poisonous feeling settles over him, something that tastes like defeat. He killed six androids. Rachael killed his goat. He slept with an android. He lost something he can’t name. And now he’s stumbling uphill through dust and dead weeds, almost walking off a cliff without noticing.
Then a rock hits him.
Not rubber. Not soft foam plastic like in the empathy box experience. A real rock, a hard one, hitting him in a very painful spot. And the pain is real. Absolute, undisguised, actual pain.
He keeps climbing. Not because he wants to. Because something is pushing him. He thinks: I’m doing what stones do. Rolling upward without volition. Without it meaning anything.
He sees a figure ahead. “Mercer?” he calls out. “Wilbur Mercer! Is that you?”
It’s his own shadow.
The Fusion
Here’s the thing about this scene. Rick is reliving the Mercer experience, but not through an empathy box. He’s doing it in the real world, alone, on a real hill, with real rocks. Nobody is fusing with him. Nobody is sharing his suffering. There’s no collective warmth of millions of humans holding the handles together.
He scrambles back down the hill, dust everywhere, and gets back to his car. His cheek is bleeding. Real blood. Multiple rocks must have hit him.
He calls the Hall of Justice. Inspector Bryant is out. So he talks to his secretary, Ann Marsten. She takes one look at him through the vidscreen and says he looks awful. Tired. Bleeding.
Then she says the line that makes this chapter click: “You look like Wilbur Mercer.”
And Rick says, “I am. I’m Wilbur Mercer. I’ve permanently fused with him. And I can’t unfuse.”
He’s sitting near the Oregon border, bleeding, exhausted, talking calmly about being a religious figure. Ann thinks he overdid it yesterday and needs sleep. She’s probably right. But something else is going on too.
Real and Fake at the Same Time
Ann mentions that people are saying Mercer is a fake. Last chapter, Buster Friendly exposed the whole thing on television. Painted skies. Rubber rocks. An old drunk actor named Al Jarry.
Rick’s answer is simple: “Mercer isn’t a fake. Unless reality is a fake.”
This is the same conclusion Isidore reached back in chapter 18 when Mercer appeared to him directly. But Rick gets there from a different direction. He didn’t have a philosophical conversation with Mercer. He climbed the hill. He got hit by rocks. He experienced it, alone, without any technology, without any empathy box, without anyone else.
If the empathy box is fake, then what just happened to Rick on that hill? If Mercer is just Al Jarry on a soundstage, why is Rick bleeding real blood from real stones in a real wasteland?
Philip K. Dick is pulling the same trick he’s been pulling the entire book, just harder this time. Real and fake don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. They overlap. The fraud is genuine. The illusion has real consequences.
What Rick Lost and What He Found
Sitting in his car, Rick thinks about Rachael. He regrets not killing her. If he had, his goat would still be alive. That’s where he made the wrong decision, in the hotel room, in bed. She changed him, like she said she would. But not in the way she predicted. A much worse way.
And yet, he doesn’t care anymore. After what happened on the hill, something shifted. He wonders what would have happened if he’d kept climbing to the top. That’s where Mercer dies in the empathy box vision. That’s where Mercer’s triumph happens.
But if Rick is Mercer, then Mercer is immortal. Mercer can never die. Not in ten thousand years.
He picks up the phone to call Iran, his wife.
And freezes.
Something moved. Outside the car. Among the rocks and dust, something is alive.
Why This Chapter Matters
This is the spiritual climax of the entire novel. Not the gunfights with androids. Not the Voigt-Kampff tests. Not even the Mercer exposure. This quiet, strange, almost hallucinatory scene of a tired man climbing a hill and becoming the thing he used to only watch through a machine.
Dick is saying something profound here. Empathy isn’t a technology. It isn’t even a religion. It’s what happens when you suffer alone and keep going anyway. Rick didn’t need the empathy box. He didn’t need other humans fusing with him. He just needed to be broken enough, emptied enough, to stop being Rick Deckard and start being something more.
The chapter ends on a cliffhanger. What moved in the dirt? What did Rick see? After everything that has happened, after all the death and deception and exhaustion, something alive has appeared in the dead zone.
We’ll find out what it is next chapter.