Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 5: Testing Rachael
Chapter 5 is where Rick Deckard sits across from Rachael Rosen, shines a light into her eye, and starts asking questions designed to make her feel things. And the whole chapter reads like a poker game where both sides are cheating.
The Test Begins
The Voigt-Kampff test works by measuring involuntary physical reactions. Eye muscles, capillary response. Rick asks a series of disturbing scenarios and watches the needles on his gauges. The verbal answers don’t matter. Only the body’s automatic response counts.
So he starts. “You are given a calfskin wallet on your birthday.” The needles go crazy. Strong reaction. Good. Then a butterfly killing jar. Smaller reaction. A wasp on your wrist. Almost nothing. He keeps going. A nude girl on a bearskin rug. Rachael doesn’t react to the dead animal skin at all. She’s focused on the nudity, the social situation. An android response, Rick notes to himself.
Here’s what’s brilliant about this scene. Dick gives us enough detail to follow the test ourselves. We can see the pattern. Some questions get strong reactions, some get nothing. Some reactions are correct but feel simulated. Like when Rick describes a lobster being dropped into boiling water and Rachael says “Oh god, that’s depraved!” but the needles barely move. The words are right. The body is wrong.
The Verdict
Rick finishes the test. Raw oysters get a bigger reaction from Rachael than boiled dog. That’s backwards for a human. He puts down his pencil, turns off the light, and tells her: “You’re an android.”
And then something unexpected happens. The Rosens push back. Eldon Rosen, Rachael’s uncle, insists she’s human. He has an explanation ready. Rachael grew up on a spaceship, the Salander 3. She spent fourteen of her eighteen years in deep space, raised by nine adults and a tape library. She never experienced Earth. Of course her empathy responses are different. She’s basically a sheltered kid with no real-world context.
It’s a reasonable argument. Rick almost buys it.
Rachael herself is angry, afraid. She says the police would have killed her in a routine checkpoint. She’s known this risk for four years. And here’s the kicker: she tells Rick that the Rosens could have just gone along with whatever results he got. They chose to challenge him openly. Why would they do that if she were really an android?
The Bribe
This is where the chapter gets really interesting. Rick starts packing up. He accepts that his test failed. His instructions are clear: if it misidentifies a human as android, cancel all further testing. He’s done.
But the Rosens are not done with him.
Eldon points to a camera on the ceiling. Everything was recorded. Rick’s “failure” is on tape. And then comes the offer. Rachael says it casually: “How would you like to own an owl?”
An owl. The rarest animal on Earth. Functionally priceless. And Rick is a bounty hunter who lives on commission. If the Voigt-Kampff test gets declared invalid, he has no way to identify androids, which means no bounties, which means no income. The Rosens have him cornered. Accept the owl, agree the test is flawed, and walk away rich. Or go back to San Francisco and admit you can’t do your job anymore.
They negotiate terms. Breeding rights. Inheritance clauses. Whether Rick might get murdered so they can reclaim the owl. It’s absurd and tense at the same time. A corporate bribery meeting dressed up as a pet adoption.
One More Question
But Rick notices something. Rachael keeps calling the owl “it.” Not “she” or “her.” Just “it.” For someone supposedly raised in a culture that worships animals, that’s a strange slip.
He asks for one more question. Rachael sits back down reluctantly. Rick sets up the equipment again. And then he does something clever. He strokes his briefcase and says it’s made of babyhide. “One hundred percent genuine human babyhide.”
The needles go wild. But too late. The reaction came, but with a delay. A real human would have reacted instantly, or not at all. Rachael reacted strongly but slowly. She had to process what “babyhide” meant before she could fake the horror. That fraction of a second told Rick everything.
The test works. Rachael is an android.
The Truth Comes Out
Rick asks Eldon directly: does she know? No. They programmed her completely with false memories. But Eldon thinks she started to suspect at the end, when Rick asked for one more question.
Rachael sits there, pale and quiet, absorbing the fact that she is not what she thought she was.
Eldon tells her not to worry. She’s not an illegal escaped android. She’s property of the Rosen Association, used as a sales demonstration for people thinking about emigrating to the colonies. She’s a showroom model. When Eldon puts his hand on her shoulder to comfort her, she flinches.
Rick leaves. On his way out, he asks one last thing: is the owl real?
No. The owl is artificial. There are no owls.
My Take
This chapter is a masterclass in power dynamics. The Rosens thought they had Rick beaten. They set the trap perfectly. Recorded his mistake, dangled the rarest prize imaginable, and let him stew. But Rick’s instinct as a bounty hunter, that attention to small details, saved him. One pronoun. One delayed reaction. That was all it took.
And then there’s Rachael. She just found out her entire identity is manufactured. Her memories, her personality, her sense of self, all programmed. Dick doesn’t give us much of her internal reaction. Just that she went pale and flinched at a touch. But those two details carry enormous weight.
The chapter also raises a nasty question about Rick’s profession. Eldon points out that police departments may have already retired actual humans who just had weak empathy responses. The Voigt-Kampff test is the only tool they have, and it almost failed here. Rick knows this now. And he still has six Nexus-6 androids to hunt.
He’s going to earn every cent of that bounty. If he survives.