Deckard hopes this mission will earn him enough bounty money to buy a live animal to replace his lone electric sheep to comfort his depressed wife Iran.

These androids are made of organic matter so similar to a human's that only a posthumous ' bone marrow analysis' can independently prove the difference, making them almost impossible to distinguish from real people. Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department, is assigned to 'retire' (kill) six androids of the new and highly intelligent Nexus-6 model which have recently escaped from Mars and traveled to Earth. Acquiring high-status animal pets and linking in to empathy boxes appear to be the only two ways characters in the story strive for existential fulfillment. The trend of increased empathy has coincidentally motivated a new technology-based religion called Mercerism, which uses 'empathy boxes' to link users simultaneously to a virtual reality of collective suffering, centered on a martyr-like character, Wilbur Mercer, who eternally climbs up a hill while being hit with crashing stones. Rick Deckard, the novel's protagonist, for example, owns an electric black-faced sheep. However, poor people can only afford realistic-looking robot imitations of live animals.

On Earth, owning real live animals has become a fashionable status symbol, both because mass extinctions have made authentic animals rare and because of the accompanying cultural push for greater empathy. As a result, American and Soviet police departments remain vigilant and keep android bounty-hunting officers on duty. The Rosen Association manufactures the androids on a colony on Mars, but some androids violently rebel and escape to Earth, where they hope to remain undetected. Moving away from Earth comes with the incentive of free personal androids: robot servants identical to humans.

In 1992 (2021 in later editions) following a devastating global war called World War Terminus, the Earth's radioactively polluted atmosphere leads the United Nations to encourage mass emigrations to off-world colonies to preserve humanity's genetic integrity.

Maze runner quotes