1990

The year 1990 stands as a watershed in the timeline of the novel's post-apocalyptic society, the moment when the United Nations' grand bargain between emigration and survival crystallized into law. By this date, the U.N. had made it easy to emigrate and difficult if not impossible to stay, coupling the carrot of an android servant with the stick of radioactive fallout. Under this law, each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of his choice, and by 1990 the variety of subtypes had passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s. This was the ultimate incentive for leaving Earth, a world where the legacy of World War Terminus had diminished in potency but still filtered in, bringing its daily load of befouling filth and threatening to classify those who remained as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race.

The Emigration Imperative and Its Consequences

The law of 1990 formalized a stark choice: emigrate or degenerate. Those who could not survive the dust had passed into oblivion years ago, and the dust, weaker now and confronting the strong survivors, only deranged minds and genetic properties. The U.N. program, with its promise of a custom-tailored humanoid robot designed for each emigrant's unique needs, became the dominant force in shaping population distribution. The government in Washington, with its colonization program, constituted the sole sponsor that many found themselves forced to listen to, as TV sets in empty apartments hawked the promise of a new life on Mars. The Rosen Association, the system's largest manufacturer of androids, followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture, producing progressively more human types to meet colonial demand. By 1990, the Nexus-6 brain unit had been developed, a fact that would soon force police agencies to confront the limits of their detection methods.

The Nexus-6 and the Challenge to Detection

The release of the Nexus-6 brain unit in 1990 represented a quantum leap in android intelligence, one that the Rosen Association knew would test the boundaries of existing detection technology. The Nexus-6 had two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity, and in .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. The Rosen Association assured police agencies that a Nexus-6 could be delineated by standard profile tests, but by 1990 the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, devised by the Pavlov Institute working in the Soviet Union, had become the primary tool for distinguishing androids from humans. The year thus set the stage for the crisis that would unfold in 1992, when bounty hunters like Rick Deckard would find themselves hunting androids that were, in terms of pure intellectual capacity, superior to many human specials.

The World Left Behind

For those who remained on Earth after 1990, the world had become a place of decay and silence. The dust had struck species almost as hard as it had the birds, of which almost none survived. The saying currently blabbed by posters, TV ads, and government junk mail ran: "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!" Those who could not emigrate, like the specials and chickenheads, found themselves trapped in a world where the silence of the void could be felt as a visible, living presence. The year 1990 thus marks not just a legal milestone but the beginning of a new phase in human history, one in which the line between human and android, between the authentic and the artificial, would become increasingly difficult to draw.