Electric toad
The electric toad is a false animal that Rick Deckard discovers in the desert near the Oregon border after his final android retirements, believing it to be a living toad—a species long extinct and sacred to Wilbur Mercer—only to have his wife Iran reveal its artificial nature by finding its concealed control panel. The object crystallizes the novel's central tension between authentic life and convincing simulation, and its ambiguous status—neither fully alive nor merely inert—mirrors the ontological questions raised by the androids Deckard has spent the day killing.
Discovery and Initial Belief
After retiring the last three Nexus-6 androids—Pris Stratton, Irmgard Baty, and Roy Baty—in a single marathon day, Deckard flies his hovercar north into the uninhabited desolation near the Oregon border, exhausted and spiritually hollow. Sitting in his parked car, he notices a bulge in the ground among the stones and recognizes the creature as a toad, a species listed as extinct in Sidney's Animal & Fowl Catalogue under the entry "TOAD (Bufonidae), all varieties . . . . . . . . . . . . . E." He has never seen one before but knows it from old nature films on government TV. The toad is the critter most precious to Wilbur Mercer, along with the donkey, but toads most of all. Deckard's heart lugs under the shock of recognition; he grabs a cardboard box from his trunk, dumps out a spare fuel pump, and carefully brushes the loose soil away from the toad, which has shoved aside grit to make a partial hole for itself, its metabolism slowed almost to a halt. He lifts the toad out, feeling its peculiar coolness, its body dry, wrinkled, and almost flabby, as cold as if it had taken up residence in a grotto miles under the earth. The toad squirms, trying to pry itself from his grip with its weak hind feet. Deckard ties the box shut again and again, thinking, "Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world." He decides to keep the discovery as a surprise for his wife Iran and flies the seven hundred miles back to San Francisco.
Revelation of Artificiality
When Deckard arrives home, Iran opens the door to find him covered in dust, a cut on his cheek, his eyes shining with awe like a little boy's. He holds the cardboard box with both hands and will not set it down. After she fixes him coffee, he announces, "A toad." Iran, stemming her aversion, accepts the creature from him and turns it over. She discovers something: with her nail she locates the tiny control panel on its abdomen and flips it open. "Oh," Deckard says, his face falling by degrees. Crestfallen, he gazes mutely at the false animal, fiddles with its legs as if baffled, then carefully replaces it in its box. He wonders how it got out there in the desolate part of California, concluding that somebody must have put it there, with no way to tell what for. Iran feels guilty seeing the effect on him, but Deckard says, "I'm glad to know. Or rather—I'd prefer to know." He adds, "The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are."
Connections to Other Artificial Animals
The electric toad belongs to the same category of sophisticated simulation as Deckard's electric sheep, which he acquired after his real sheep Groucho died of tetanus from a piece of baling wire. That sheep, a "premium job" made from a photograph, required as much time and attention as a living animal; its concealed control panel, which Deckard once snapped open to reveal to his neighbor Bill Barbour, was the mark of its fraudulence. Deckard had long felt the tyranny of an object that does not know he exists, and he had noted the similarity between an electric animal and an android: both lack the ability to appreciate the existence of another. The electric toad, like the electric sheep, is a subform of the android—a vastly inferior robot—and its discovery and unmasking recapitulate the ontological shock Deckard experienced when he first encountered the Nexus-6 android Rachael Rosen and realized that the Rosen Association's owl was also artificial. The toad's control panel, identical in function to the one on his sheep, is the material sign that the boundary between the real and the simulated cannot be crossed.
Aftermath and Significance
After Deckard goes to bed, Iran sits at the kitchen table next to the box containing the electric toad, which flops and rustles. She wonders what it "eats" and what repairs on it will run, deciding on artificial flies. She opens the phone book, dials an animal-accessories supplier, and orders one pound of artificial flies that really fly around and buzz. The clerk suggests a mixed assortment of artificial crawling and flying bugs, a perpetually renewing puddle, and a kit containing sand, multicolored pebbles, and bits of organic debris, as well as a periodic tongue adjustment. Iran gives her address and hangs up, feeling better. The electric toad thus becomes a domestic object to be maintained, its artificiality accepted rather than mourned. Deckard's earlier reflection—that the electric things have their lives too, paltry as those lives are—finds its practical expression in Iran's matter-of-fact provisioning. The toad, like the electric sheep, will be cared for as if it were alive, and the pretense will be sustained. The object's significance lies not in its genuineness but in the human need to invest it with meaning, a need that persists even after the illusion is shattered.
