Retirement

Retirement, in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is the official euphemism for the killing of escaped androids by state-licensed bounty hunters. It is not a crime but a profession, one that provides its practitioners with a salary from the San Francisco Police Department and, crucially, a bounty of one thousand dollars per android retired. This bounty system is the primary economic incentive; Rick Deckard reflects that if he could retire five andys, the money would allow him to buy the real animal he desperately craves. The term itself is a bureaucratic sanitization, a word that allows the hunter to frame the act as a form of disposal rather than murder, a linguistic shield against the moral weight of the work.

Legal and Moral Framework

The legal basis for retirement rests on the U.N. emigration-and-android law, which grants each emigrant an android servant but strictly forbids those androids from returning to Earth. Any android found on Earth is, by definition, an illegal alien and a fugitive. The moral justification is provided by Mercerism, the dominant religion of the era. Its central tenet, "You shall kill only the killers," allows bounty hunters like Deckard to categorize androids as "The Killers"—predatory, soulless entities devoid of empathy. Deckard explicitly thinks of an escaped humanoid robot as the epitome of The Killers, a creature with no regard for animals and no ability to feel empathic joy. This theological framing transforms a paid execution into a sacred duty, a defense of authentic life against a hollow imitation.

The Voigt-Kampff Test as Gatekeeper

Before an android can be retired, it must first be identified. The primary tool for this is the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, a psychological instrument that measures autonomic responses—capillary dilation in the face and fluctuations in eye-muscle tension—to morally shocking stimuli. The test is designed to exploit a fundamental difference: androids, no matter how intellectually advanced, cannot produce genuine empathic responses. The Nexus-6 brain unit, with its two trillion constituents and ten million possible neural pathways, represents a direct challenge to this system. The Rosen Association, the manufacturer, nearly succeeds in discrediting the test by having Rachael Rosen, a Nexus-6 android, fail it in a controlled setting. Deckard only salvages the test by using a trick question about a briefcase made of "genuine human babyhide," which triggers a delayed but unmistakable reaction. This episode proves the test still works, but it also reveals the razor-thin margin by which the system functions.

The Act of Retirement and Its Psychological Toll

The act of retirement itself is a violent, instantaneous event. Deckard uses a laser tube, and the android's body—often a Nexus-6 brain unit—is destroyed. The remains are then subjected to a bone marrow analysis to confirm the kill and justify the bounty. The work is dangerous; Dave Holden, the senior bounty hunter, is hospitalized with a laser track through his spine after being ambushed by the android Max Polokov. Yet the true cost is psychological. After retiring Luba Luft, a gifted opera singer, Deckard is shaken. He tells Phil Resch, "I'm getting out of this business," and later reflects that he is "capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids." This empathy is a professional liability, a crack in the ideological armor that makes the job possible.

The Crisis of Conscience and the End of a Career

Deckard's crisis culminates in his encounter with Rachael Rosen. After sleeping with her, he finds himself unable to kill her when she confronts him, even though he knows she is an android and that her purpose is to neutralize bounty hunters. He later realizes that this failure has a direct consequence: Rachael retaliates by killing his newly purchased black Nubian goat, pushing it off the roof of his apartment building. The loss of the goat, a symbol of his hope and his humanity, drives Deckard into a state of despair. He drives to the Oregon border, climbs a hill alone, and experiences a solitary fusion with Wilbur Mercer, being struck by real rocks. This experience, which he undergoes without an empathy box, suggests that the act of retirement has permanently altered his relationship to the world. He has become Mercer, the eternal sufferer, and the distinction between hunter and hunted, human and android, has collapsed. The system of retirement, which was meant to protect humanity, has instead forced him to violate his own identity, fulfilling Mercer's curse that "you will be required to do wrong no matter where you go."