Seattle

Seattle serves as the corporate seat of the Rosen Association, the dominant manufacturer of humanoid robots for the colonization program. It is to this city that Rick Deckard is sent by his superior, Inspector Harry Bryant, to test the Voigt-Kampff empathy scale against the new Nexus-6 brain unit before he is permitted to hunt the six escaped androids in Northern California. The journey to Seattle is framed as a necessary preliminary: Bryant insists that Deckard "fly to Seattle and talk with the Rosen people" and obtain "a representative sampling of types employing the new Nexus-6 unit" before taking on Dave Holden's list. The city thus functions as a proving ground for the very technology of detection upon which Deckard's profession depends.

The Rosen Association Building and Its Menagerie

When Deckard lands his police hovercar on the roof of the Rosen Association Building, he is met by a young woman, Rachael Rosen, who immediately confronts him with a mixture of sullen distaste and corporate defiance. The building itself is a monument to the association's wealth and power, but what strikes Deckard most forcefully is not the architecture but the animals. The roof houses a collection of living creatures that stagger him: a raccoon named Bill, acquired from a subsidiary corporation, and an owl dozing on a perch in a small cage. Deckard, who has spent years tending an electric sheep and yearning for a real animal, is overwhelmed. He knows from Sidney's catalogue that owls are listed as extinct, yet here one breathes before him. The girl explains that the association does not buy from Sidney's or any animal dealer; all their purchases are from private parties, and they employ their own naturalists working in Canada. For Deckard, the sight of the owl crystallizes his longing and his sense of economic inferiority. He asks if they would sell it, and Rachael tells him flatly that he could not possibly pay the price. The building thus becomes a stage for the stark contrast between corporate opulence and the bounty hunter's precarious finances.

The Testing Chamber and the Corporate Trap

Inside the building, Deckard is led to a chic, living-roomish cubicle furnished with carpeting, lamps, and a modern coffee table. There he assembles his Voigt-Kampff apparatus, the simple polygraphic instruments that measure capillary dilation in the face and fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Eldon Rosen, the elderly and harried head of the association, nervously explains that he has done his best to assemble a test group. But the Rosens have a trap prepared. They present Rachael as the first subject, and Deckard, administering the test, finds that her responses register as android — the needles swing into the red for some questions, remain inert for others, and fail to detect the major element of a dead animal pelt. When he concludes that she is an android, Eldon Rosen reveals that she is his niece, a human who grew up aboard the Salander 3, cut off from Earth's social norms. The test, it seems, has failed. Deckard realizes he has been recorded by a ceiling camera; the Rosens have voided his testing apparatus before the test truly began. The room, with its comfortable furniture and the advance copy of Sidney's February supplement lying on the end table, becomes the site of a corporate ambush that threatens to destroy Deckard's career.

The Retest and the Revelation

Deckard, however, is not yet defeated. He asks to administer one more question, and Rachael, after a glance at her uncle, grudgingly returns to her seat. He trains the pencil beam of light on her eye and reattaches the adhesive patch to her cheek. Then he strokes the black leather surface of his briefcase and says, "One hundred percent genuine human babyhide." The dial indicators gyrate frantically — but only after a pause. The reaction came too late. Deckard knows the correct reaction period down to a fraction of a second; there should have been none. He has proven that Rachael is an android, and that the Voigt-Kampff scale still works. Eldon Rosen admits that they programmed her completely, though toward the end she suspected. The room, which had been the setting of Deckard's near-defeat, becomes the scene of his vindication. But the victory is costly: he has seen the lengths to which the Rosen Association will go to protect its products, and he knows that he must now face six more Nexus-6 androids, each as clever as Rachael.

The Artificial Owl and the Aftermath

As Deckard prepares to leave, he asks one final question: "Is the owl genuine?" Rachael glances at Eldon Rosen, who answers flatly, "It doesn't matter; the owl is artificial. There are no owls." The revelation that even the association's prized animal is a fake completes Deckard's disillusionment. He steps numbly out into the corridor, reflecting that he has now come up against the Nexus-6 for the first time. The Rosen Association, he realizes, does a good job at protecting its products. Seattle, which had promised the sight of a living owl, leaves him instead with the knowledge that the creature he yearned for never existed. The city, in the end, is a place of manufactured illusions, where even the most precious animals are electric, and where a corporation can nearly dismantle the only test that separates humans from their creations.