Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In Dick's post-nuclear San Francisco, real animals have nearly gone extinct, and owning one has become the ultimate status marker under a mandatory religion, Mercerism, that measures moral worth in empathy the way money measures wealth. Rick keeps an electric sheep on his roof because he can't afford a real one, a private, specific shame that only makes sense in a world where Mercerism has turned authentic feeling into something you're expected to be able to afford, exactly like a car or a house.

The Voight-Kampff test he administers to suspected androids measures empathy through involuntary physical response to questions about cruelty to animals, built on the premise that only androids can fake having a conscience. But the novel spends its length quietly dismantling that premise: Rick's colleague Phil Resch openly enjoys killing, and Rick himself retires three androids in a single afternoon with barely a flicker of hesitation, especially once the bounty gets him closer to a real goat. Sleeping with Rachael Rosen, an android who later tells him she's slept with other bounty hunters specifically to compromise their nerve for the job, blurs the line the test claims to draw cleanly, and Rick keeps loving her anyway, which the book treats as evidence, not exception.

Buster Friendly, broadcasting nearly around the clock, reveals Mercerism as an elaborate hoax staged by an aging alcoholic actor decades earlier. Yet out in the desert not long after, Rick has a genuinely mystical Mercer-style experience anyway, finding a toad he believes is a real, supposedly extinct species. Dick's actual interest isn't whether the religion is fraudulent, it's whether the feeling it produces still counts even after the fraud is exposed, since the toad turns out to be electric too, and Rick's wife Iran buys it fake fly food regardless, out of the same impulse to care that started the whole test in the first place.

J.R. Isidore, the radiation-damaged 'chickenhead' who shelters Pris and the Baty androids, is the novel's clearest empathy case precisely because no test would ever certify him: his intelligence has been legally downgraded by the state, yet he's the character most instinctively generous toward androids and humans alike, sheltering Pris out of simple loneliness rather than any tested capacity for feeling. Dick uses him to argue that the Voight-Kampff apparatus was measuring the wrong thing all along, since the empire of bureaucratic classification the novel runs on, special, android, chickenhead, keeps failing exactly the people and things most worth protecting.