CityOfAngels

As I was in the hospital waiting room, I had nothing else to do but read, so I brought along Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. It only took me two days to complete it (I'm a slow reader but it was only 240-something pages), but now I have a few questions. I'm going to put them all in the spoiler tag, so DO NOT READ THE SPOILER UNLESS YOU HAVE READ THE ENTIRE BOOK!

Spoiler:
1) When Isidore (the "chickenhead" or "special") meets Pris (one of the three remaining Nexus-6 androids in the apartment), she originally states her name as Rachael Rosen. Now I understand that Pris' structure is exactly the same as Rachael Rosen's, but she's a completely different android altogether. Did their memory chips somehow get the same memory? Or what?
2) What is this Mercerism thing? I understand they use something called an "empathy box" to talk to whoever this Mercer guy is, and I guess symbolically he has rocks thrown at him as if he's some sort of martyr, so when they talk to him they have rocks thrown at themselves, too. Then on the Buster Friendly Show they prove that it's a sham? How the heck does this all work? Is using the empathy box the equivalent of praying? And if they actually see and talk to Mercer, and he has actual responses to all of their questions, how could they be pre-recordings of a drunken actor? I just didn't quite get this one.
3) Why did Rachael Rosen kill Rick Deckard's goat? Was it out of anger that he couldn't be with her? Or was it just another attempt to get some sort of revenge since she was in cahoots with the rest of the Nexus-6 androids?
4) What ever becomes of that "secret police station" run by androids? Do they shut down after finding Garland "retired"? Or do they keep on in their business, not knowing they're androids, trying to find Rick Deckard? And why didn't the "real" police station know about this other police station that had apparently been running in the same San Francisco jurisdiction? That really confused me.
5) If the secret police station was swarming with androids, why was Resch a human? Were the androids so confident in their scheme that they hired human bounty hunters to hunt after their own kind?
6) It's stated a few times that androids have absolutely no empathy, even for other androids. So why was Roy Baty so grief-stricken when Deckard retired Irmgard Baty? And how or why did they get "married" in the first place?

All in all I loved this book. I've seen the movie, "Blade Runner" (which is loosely based on this book), and even though it's one of my favorite movies of all time, it disappoints me to know they strayed from the book so much. I mean, it was pretty much a completely different story. I look at Blade Runner as a side-story in the world created by the book. The only confusion in doing that is Rachael, because her character is in the movie (played by Sean Young), and she's also almost completely different in the movie. I'm in the middle of playing the Blade Runner PC Game (which I also love), and I can only count it also as a side-story, because the stories just don't match up with each other.