Bounty hunter Rick Deckard wakes up to a world devastated by nuclear war, where humans care for animals to prevent the mass extinction of several species, where androids are colonial slaves who kill their masters and flee to hide on Earth. You know, just another day in the year of our Lord 2021.

So in the end, Deckard indeed has an epiphany of sorts. Or at least a big moment for him. He finds a living toad in the desert, which is extraordinary and has multiple implications: A living animal is in itself an oddity in a world where most animals are extinct, very sought after, and extremely hard to come by.

They were willing to sacrifice him both in order to ensure their own survival and because they believed that his life had no real value. John’s second spider that Mercer gives to him symbolizes John’s own rebirth from the void of being used by the androids and the destruction of Mercerism by Buster Friendly.

Garland was a Nexus-6 android who posed as a San Francisco Police Department officer at a defunct precinct almost entirely occupied by androids.

Plot Summary: Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter, plans to kill enough errant androids (replicants) so he can replace his robotic sheep with a real one. In the process of hunting down these slave pseudo-humans, Rick Deckard falls in love with an android and learns about himself and what it means to be human–and inhuman.

Empathy is the main theme of the novel and is the crux on which Dick’s metaphysical reflection on the meaning of life hangs. Each character in the novel must deal with what it means to be empathetic and whether that allows someone to be valued as a living thing.

Because the state of nature is so dire, pets are extremely valuable, and it’s a mark of social status to own a sheep, a goat, or a horse. The relationship between humans, animals, and the environment is even revealed as an important theme in the title of the book itself.

Roy Batty is the main antagonist of the Philip K. Dick science fiction novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s 1982 dark sci-fi thriller film Blade Runner which was based on the novel.

Rachael (Sean Young)’s Timeline and Summary When Rick Deckard shows up, he administers the Voight-Kampff test to her, and discovers that she’s a replicant—though a special one, very difficult to detect and with false implanted memories. Later, at Deckard’s apartment, he reveals to Rachael that she’s a replicant.

In Blade Runner 2049 Rachael died in childbirth in 2021, and the child was hidden by the replicant underground. In 2020, Tyrell Corporation introduced the Nexus-8 replicant, built with open lifespans not limited to only four years.