Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 3: The Assignment
Rick Deckard is late to work. But before he even makes it to the office, he stops in front of a pet shop and stares at an ostrich. A real one. The only ostrich on the entire West Coast. Thirty thousand dollars.
This is how Chapter 3 opens, and honestly, it tells you everything about who Rick is.
The Ostrich and the Dream
Remember, in this world a real animal is the ultimate status symbol. Rick already has a sheep at home, but it’s fake. An electric sheep that he maintains to keep up appearances. So when he sees this ostrich sitting in a heated plastic cage on animal row in San Francisco, he can’t look away.
He checks the price tag. Thirty grand. That’s insane money. But Rick doesn’t walk away thinking “no way.” He walks away thinking “maybe.”
He even calls the pet shop later from his desk. Asks about down payments. The salesman talks monthly contracts, six percent interest, trade-ins. Rick tries to haggle, knock off two thousand. The salesman won’t budge. Says the price is already a thousand under book value. Check your Sidney’s catalog if you don’t believe me.
Here’s the thing. Rick gives a fake name. Frank Merriwell. Makes up an address. He knows he can’t afford this bird. But he’s already doing the math in his head.
And then he makes one more call. This time to the fake-animal shop where he got his electric sheep. How much for an electric ostrich? Less than eight hundred dollars. So the real one costs almost 40 times more than the fake.
That gap between real and fake, between what Rick wants and what Rick can afford, is basically the engine of this whole book.
Dave Holden Gets Shot
But the big news at the San Francisco Hall of Justice is not about ostriches. Rick’s boss, Inspector Harry Bryant, catches him on the way in. Dave Holden, the senior bounty hunter, the department’s number one android killer, is in the hospital. Laser track through his spine. He’ll be laid up for at least a month while they try to get a new organic plastic spinal section to take hold.
Rick’s secretary, Ann Marsten, fills in the details. It was probably one of the new Nexus-6 androids made by the Rosen Association. Their latest brain unit can select from two trillion constituents and ten million separate neural pathways. In less than half a second, a Nexus-6 can choose from fourteen different reaction postures.
That’s not just smart. That’s smarter than a lot of humans.
The Nexus-6 Problem
This is where the chapter gets really interesting. Rick pulls out his old manila envelope with specs on the Nexus-6, and what he reads is not comforting.
No intelligence test can catch these androids. Intelligence tests haven’t worked on androids in years anyway, not since the crude models of the 1970s. The Nexus-6 actually surpasses several classes of human “specials” in raw intelligence. The servant has become smarter than some of its masters.
So what’s left? Empathy. The Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test. That’s the only thing separating android from human now. The idea is that empathy is a group instinct. A solitary predator, like a spider, has no use for empathy. It would actually hurt a spider’s survival if it felt bad about eating its prey. Cats would starve if they cared about the mouse.
Rick has a neat little theory about this. Empathy must be limited to herbivores, or at least omnivores. Because empathy blurs the line between hunter and victim. In Mercerism, everyone rises together and falls together. If one creature suffers, all creatures carry a piece of that suffering.
And androids? They’re solitary predators. No empathy. No connection to the group.
Rick likes this theory. It makes his job easier to stomach. He’s not killing people. He’s retiring killers. Mercer said “you shall kill only the killers.” And for Rick, an escaped android that murdered its master, that feels nothing for other living things, that’s the definition of a killer.
But there’s something uncomfortable here too. Rick is building himself a moral framework that lets him sleep at night. And Philip K. Dick is quietly showing us the cracks in that framework. If empathy is what makes you human, and the test is the only way to prove empathy, what happens when the test stops working?
The Mixed Feelings
The chapter ends with Rick sitting in Bryant’s office, waiting for the inspector to finish a phone call, reading the Nexus-6 specs again. And Dick gives us one perfect sentence about Rick’s state of mind: “He felt depressed. And yet, logically, because of Dave’s sudden disappearance from the work scene, he should be at least guardedly pleased.”
Dave getting shot is terrible. But Dave getting shot means Rick gets Dave’s assignments. More retirements means more bounty money. More bounty money means maybe, just maybe, he can afford that ostrich.
Rick wants to be a good person. He also wants that bird. And this chapter shows how those two things are about to collide.
What’s Coming
Rick is about to get the assignment of his career. Six escaped Nexus-6 androids. The most advanced models ever made. The ones that might be able to fool the only test that matters.
No pressure.