August 1991

August 1991 is the month when the Rosen Association first released the specifications and performance charts for its Nexus-6 brain unit, a technological leap that immediately alarmed law enforcement agencies throughout Earth. The Nexus-6 represented a qualitative advance over all previous android brain units, possessing a capacity to select within a field of two trillion constituents and a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity. In 0.45 of a second, an android equipped with such a brain could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. The release of these specifications triggered immediate protests from most police agencies that dealt with escaped androids, including the San Francisco Police Department, whose senior bounty hunter Dave Holden would later be lasered by a Nexus-6 android posing as a Soviet police officer.

Context and Precedent

The pattern of each improved brain unit outpacing detection methods was well established by August 1991. When the Sudermann company had introduced its T-14 brain unit in 1989, over fifty of those androids had made their way to Earth and remained undetected for periods up to an entire year before the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test was devised by the Pavlov Institute in the Soviet Union. No T-14 android had managed to pass that particular test, but each new generation of brain units forced a recalibration of detection technology. The Nexus-6 release in August 1991 represented the most extreme version of this recurring crisis, since the new brain unit surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence, meaning the servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master.

Police Response and the Voigt-Kampff Test

By the time of the Nexus-6 release, intelligence tests had not trapped an android in years, not since the primordial crude varieties of the 1970s. The only remaining reliable detection method was the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, which measured empathic response rather than intelligence. An android, no matter how gifted intellectually, could make no sense out of the fusion experience central to Mercerism, which even subnormal chickenheads managed with no difficulty. The Voigt-Kampff scale had been altered three years earlier by Kampff himself, but by August 1991 it was already understood that this test was not specific for the new brain units. Inspector Harry Bryant of the San Francisco Police Department would later send bounty hunter Rick Deckard to Seattle to test the Voigt-Kampff scale against Nexus-6 types, a mission that nearly resulted in the test being discredited when the Rosen Association attempted to pass off an android as a human subject.

Significance

The August 1991 release of the Nexus-6 brain unit fundamentally reshaped the relationship between android manufacturers and law enforcement. The Rosen Association, operating under colonial law from its parent autofactory on Mars, had no legal obligation to make its products detectable. The Nexus-6 release forced police agencies to confront the possibility that their primary detection tool might fail, and it set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the retirement of eight escaped Nexus-6 androids in Northern California, including the deaths of the androids Max Polokov, Luba Luft, Inspector Garland, Pris Stratton, Irmgard Baty, and Roy Baty. The release also prompted the W.P.O. in Russia to consider filing a formal written complaint with the Rosen Association's factory representative in the East, though no such complaint would ultimately change the fundamental dynamic of technological escalation between android production and detection.