Rick Deckard and Luba Luft
Rick Deckard and Luba Luft meet when Deckard, acting on Dave Holden's list, attempts to administer the Voigt-Kampff empathy test to the opera singer, whom he suspects is a Nexus-6 android. Their encounter becomes a tense, adversarial game of wits that ends with Luba's arrest of Deckard and, later, her death at the hands of bounty hunter Phil Resch, an event that profoundly shakes Deckard's moral certainty about his work.
The Opera House Encounter
Deckard finds Luba Luft at the War Memorial Opera House, where she is rehearsing Mozart's The Magic Flute. He is immediately struck by the quality of her voice, rating it with the best in his collection of historic tapes, and he reflects that the Rosen Association built her well. As he watches her sing the role of Pamina, he perceives himself as a "form-destroyer" called forth by what he hears and sees. When he enters her dressing room after the rehearsal, Luba is marking a clothbound score with a ball-point pen, still in costume and makeup except for her wimple. Deckard tells her she compares favorably to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, but she responds with cold reserve, a quality he has encountered in many androids. When he explains he is from the San Francisco Police Department and must administer a personality-profile test, she becomes apprehensive. She asks if he thinks she is an android, and when he explains that an android does not care what happens to any other android, she retorts, "Then you must be an android." She challenges him to take the test first, suggesting that his own memories might be false, and that he might have killed a human who looked like him and taken his place.
The Test and the Arrest
Deckard proceeds with the Voigt-Kampff test, but Luba's responses are evasive and her semantic fog makes accurate readings impossible. She claims not to know what a wasp is, and when asked about a movie showing boiled dog stuffed with rice, she argues that nobody would kill and eat a dog because they are worth a fortune, and that the dog must be ersatz. When Deckard asks about a mountain cabin with a deer's head mounted above the fireplace, she misunderstands "Currier and Ives" as "currier rice." Frustrated, Deckard tries a question about dating a man, but Luba breaks in, saying she wouldn't be there. As she nervously rubs her cheek, she detaches the adhesive disk, which skids under her dressing table. When Deckard kneels to retrieve it, he stands up to find himself looking into a laser tube. Luba accuses him of being a sexual deviant and calls the police. A harness bull, Officer Crams, arrives, and Luba tells him that Deckard pretended to be taking a poll and then began asking obscene questions. Crams claims he knows all the bounty hunters and has never heard of Deckard or Inspector Bryant. When Deckard tries to call Bryant, the connection fails, and Crams arrests him, taking him to the Mission Street Hall of Justice, a building Deckard has never seen before.
The Museum and the Killing
After escaping the Mission Street station with the help of bounty hunter Phil Resch, Deckard returns to the opera house, but Luba has left for the Edvard Munch exhibit at the museum. Deckard and Resch find her there, absorbed in a drawing of a young girl seated on the edge of a bed, an expression of bewildered wonder on her face. Luba asks Deckard to buy her a reproduction of the picture, and he purchases a book of Munch's collected work for her. As they enter the elevator, Luba thanks Deckard, saying, "There's something very strange and touching about humans. An android would never have done that." She then glances icily at Resch and says she really does not like androids, that her life has consisted of imitating the human. Resch, unable to tolerate her taunts, fires his laser tube, and Luba begins to scream. Deckard, with his own laser tube, kills her. Afterward, he systematically burns the book of pictures he had just bought her into blurred ash. Resch watches without understanding, and Deckard tells him, "I'm getting out of this business." He reflects that Luba was a wonderful singer and that the planet could have used her, calling the killing insane.
Aftermath and Moral Crisis
The encounter with Luba Luft triggers a profound moral crisis in Deckard. He realizes that he is capable of feeling empathy for at least specific androids, and that his feelings for Luba were the reverse of those he is required to feel. He wonders if any human has ever felt this way before about an android. Phil Resch suggests that Deckard's reaction is about sex, that he wanted to go to bed with a female type of android. Deckard, however, is not convinced, and the experience leaves him questioning his identity and his role as a bounty hunter. He later tells his wife Iran that he saw a pattern in the way Resch killed, that Resch liked to kill, and that he himself could not continue. The death of Luba Luft, a superb singer with a talent that seemed anything but a liability to society, becomes the catalyst for Deckard's eventual decision to abandon his career.
