Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Dust to Dust

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Dust to Dust is an eight-issue BOOM! Studios comic from 2010, written by Chris Roberson and drawn by Robert Adler as a prequel to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel behind Blade Runner. It is set in San Francisco just after World War Terminus, while radioactive dust is killing the last animals. An android veteran and a human empath are sent after eight runaway combat androids, while a biologist at the Presidio looks for a cure. BOOM! collected it in two volumes, with Books One to Four in the first and Books Five to Eight in the second.

Plot Summary

Charlie Victor Finds A Dead Owl

Volume one opened in a San Francisco its narrator called a graveyard, where there were no longer enough scavengers left to disturb the bodies of the dead. A man crouched in an empty street below a burned-out building and a set of traffic lights, looking down at an owl lying in the dust. It might be one of the last owls to die, he thought, since it had been weeks, months even, since the rest of them had fallen from the sky. The man was Charlie Victor.

The owl took Charlie back to the first dead human he had ever seen, on a battlefield of World War Terminus. Charlie had looked at the body and asked whether that was all there was, and where life could be, if not in the body. He had no answer then and no better one now. Standing over the bird, he answered with the old burial words, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. His narration ended on the warning that the clock was already ticking.

Charlie Recruits Malcolm Reed

Malcolm Reed woke when his alarm went off at five, a moment the narration described as one machine giving instructions to another. He reached for the lamp, took his glasses from the nightstand, swallowed his medicine and got ready for his job at a salvage yard. Before he could leave, Charlie knocked at the door and told him he would not be going to the salvage yard. He had a new assignment. The papers Charlie carried came from the Institute of Special Trade Skills of America and marked Reed as a special, ineligible for emigration or reproduction.

On the morning news, a statement from the Grozzi Corporation admitted that a limited number of its C-V models had malfunctioned. Charlie showed Reed a Grozzi photograph and asked for help identifying eight runaways ahead of their retirement. Androids lacked emotions, and Reed, whose empathy node had been scanned, could tell them apart from people. As a teenager he had been diagnosed with a lack of affect, but the dust had turned him into an empath who felt everyone else's emotions, and the medication wrapped that in gauze. Off it, he saw feelings as colored auras. Charlie told him the rogues, like Charlie himself, had less than a year to live.

Samantha Wu Studies The Dust

Samantha Wu rode BART into the city from Oakland after burying her mother, Margaret. The dust had ended the war, and it had also ended her teaching, since Stanford cancelled its classes, and she now ran a research lab at the Presidio, looking for any kind of cure. On the platform she noticed graffiti that read Kill only the Killers, and wondered why anybody had to be killed at all. On her way in, a woman named Betty pressed a Mercer pamphlet on her and mentioned a shipment of empathy boxes that was about to arrive.

In the lab, her assistant Faith helped her with a white rabbit, the only animal to survive its first exposure to the dust. The dust levels were not dropping, humans seemed somewhat more resistant than animals, and even though the dust had ended World War Terminus, nobody knew who had released it. When Faith brought in a distribution map, Samantha mentioned that Mercer called empathy the cornerstone of society. Faith told her not to get too attached to the rabbit. In her view it was just a rat with a fluffy tail.

Talus Learns Of The New Hunter

From a building near the Transamerica Pyramid, the android Talus looked over the city and said that all organic life would be extinct soon enough. His only regret was that he might not be around to see it. Hope, who had been working undercover at police headquarters, came to him with confirmation that a new hunter was on the ground, and that he was one of them. Talus called it a change in strategy. If the humans had started sending androids after androids, he might yet be around to see the extinction after all.

Talus gathered the rogues and told them the hunter was a C-V model like themselves. Cabirus called him commander before correcting himself, since Talus said there were no ranks among free beings. When Cabirus asked about the new strategy, Talus said the dust was choking the life out of the world, but the living were not dying fast enough. He wanted to be there watching when the last living human took his final breath. They would all die too, he said, but the humans had to go first.

Tracing A Rogue Through The Cameras

Reed pointed out that rogues by definition operated outside their parameters, but Charlie insisted that every Grozzi C-V carried the same operating protocols, so he knew what the rogues were thinking. With facial recognition down across the city, he took Reed and the photographs to the office that ran the surveillance cameras and asked for help with an ongoing federal investigation. A clerk recognized one face as a model employee hired in the IT department a few weeks earlier, who had stopped showing up after a week or two. He asked whether the man was Charlie's twin.

Charlie noted that androids did not feel aggression, but their combat-response protocols gave a good imitation, and he had a sudden urge to punch somebody. The rogues had disabled facial recognition themselves, and his quarry had left the job days earlier. Reed, overwhelmed by the crowds, begged for his medication, and Charlie told him he would get it back when the mission was finished. They left with the last known address of one of the rogues. At police headquarters, an officer pulled up a file on the new hunter and his partner, and said he had them.

Mr. Monday's Apartment Of Carcasses

The address led to apartment 2B, rented by a Mr. Monday, and the room was full of animal carcasses, with a horse that someone had dragged up the stairs. Reed said that collecting bodies like that, in a human, would be serial-killer bad. The rogue was gone. For Charlie, the room called up the war, when his squad had moved through a killing zone and Talus had called humans fragile creatures, inferior, and complained about the stench of rotting meat. The sooner the last human life expired, Talus had said, the better.

Charlie had told Talus then that his operating protocols must be faulty. Standing in the carcass room years later, he wondered whether his own protocols were faulty too, and kept the question to himself. Reed, still without his medication, was the one who put the collection into human terms and called it serial-killer bad. The apartment itself had been abandoned, and whoever had kept the animals there had moved on. With nothing left to find among the carcasses, Charlie and Reed went back down to the street to keep looking for the rogue.

Shootout In The Public Library

Back on the street, Reed spotted a blank in a red hoodie waiting at a bus stop under an Off World advertisement. The rogue ran, and the chase went past a Muni bus and into the San Francisco Public Library. Reed, still off his medication, saw monsters crowding the stacks around him. Charlie remembered that C-V androids had been built to adapt, and that very few androids were better at spotting an ambush. He expected the rogue to have prepared one.

Inside, Charlie killed one rogue with a single shot to the head. A second, blond rogue struggled with him at close quarters, and Charlie shot him at point-blank range. Searching the body, he found an identification badge and told Reed they were going to the Presidio, because one of the rogues he had just retired had been working there. Reed, still off his medication, had spent the chase seeing monsters among the shelves and followed him out of the library. The badge pointed to the research facility where Samantha Wu was studying the dust, and where Hope would soon tell Talus that the hunter and his human had arrived.

Samantha Tests An Empathy Box

At the lab, Samantha had agreed to a test with Dr. Martin Penfield, who had grown up with fundamentalist parents and had pretended to convert so that Betty would get him an empathy box. The Mercerists claimed the boxes created a true fusion with Wilbur Mercer, and Penfield wanted a human subject to use one inside the lab's fMRI machine. Samantha joked that if the box fried her temporal lobe it would be his fault, and they started that night. Inside the box she found herself on a barren hillside, climbing behind Mercer as the stones came down.

Samantha came out calling the experience real and transcendent. Penfield's scans showed the box overstimulating the temporal lobe, and he compared it to zapping an android's brain with a low-level EMP, which might leave a machine with something like human emotion. Samantha asked what would happen if it did. Charlie and Reed reached the lab soon afterward, and Charlie told her plainly that he was an android. She was more curious than afraid and wanted to ask him questions, while Reed went to look for a restroom at the Presidio.

Faith Kidnaps Reed

At the rogues' base, Hope reported that the hunter and his human were at the facility, and Talus told her to strip the bodies and return. In the lab, Samantha looked through Charlie's mugshots and recognized none of them until one showed her own assistant. She insisted that Faith could not be an android, because Faith was her assistant. Charlie shouted for Reed, but it was too late. Faith was already walking Reed out of the building with a gun at his back.

Outside, Faith walked Reed past the parked cars into the orange evening light. Reed kept talking as if none of it were real, and she told him to shut up and keep walking, human. The rogues now had the one person in the city who could pick them out of a crowd, and Charlie had lost his partner along with his best way of finding them. Volume one ended there, with Samantha and Charlie left behind in the Presidio lab and the hunt turned around.

Reed Held Captive By The Rogues

Volume two opened with Reed remembering the last days of World War Terminus, when black clouds brought death and change. He had not felt anything for years before the dust, and afterward he felt everything from everyone. The people the dust simply killed, he thought, were the lucky ones. Now he was a prisoner, and Talus told him to stop cringing, since he did not plan to do him harm unless Reed forced him to. To Reed the androids were unreadable blanks, and the room was a little oasis of calm, as close to bliss as he had come.

Hope reported that Faith had heard Charlie tell Samantha the human could detect androids on sight. Faith wanted him killed quickly, but Hope wanted to learn how he did it first. Talus told the rogues that the first order of business was the hunter. If Charlie Victor survived his encounter with their brothers, Talus had left a clear trail leading back to them, and once Charlie was dealt with, their real work could begin. He took Reed to the window, and Reed picked out two androids in the crowd below on their way to another of the rogues' apartments.

Talus Recalls Breaking His Programming

Talus told Reed how he had first broken his programming in World War Terminus. His squadron had parachuted in to pacify an urban center in enemy-held territory, a hearts-and-minds campaign meant to keep casualties to a minimum. At his first sight of the civilians he saw only mindless vermin, rats, and he decided to ignore his directives and kill any human who got in his way. The android was the pinnacle of creation, he said, and shackling it to frail humanity was an obscenity.

Charlie's memories of the same war ran the other way. The C-V androids had trusted the government agents who gave them orders, because they had been programmed to obey, and good androids obeyed the orders given by humans. Charlie was still unused to giving orders to humans himself. Faith thought Reed had been close to losing his reason when she took him, and Talus remarked that the secret of identifying androids on sight was locked in the mind of a madman. Reed wondered if he was hallucinating the whole thing.

Charlie Recruits Samantha Wu

At the Presidio, Samantha could not believe her assistant was an android. Charlie explained that Faith had the same combat protocols he did, and had disabled Reed's phone and ditched it. He told Samantha she would come with him to help identify the rogue C-V android Faith, and when she protested that she had work to do, he threatened her with obstruction of justice. Samantha found Faith's home address in the lab's records. Charlie, unused to giving orders to humans, told her to hurry.

Samantha agreed on two conditions. He would call her Sam, since nobody had called her Dr. Wu since she stopped teaching, and he would answer her questions about android physiology and psychology. Charlie agreed, provided she lived long enough to ask and he was still functional enough to answer. On the way, Samantha remembered a dead cat she had seen as a child after it was hit by a car. She had learned then that you could not keep bad things away just by not looking at them.

Ambush At Faith's Apartment

Faith lived in a run-down apartment building, and Charlie kicked her door in. Someone had been there as recently as that morning, and Samantha said it looked like a regular person's apartment, which made it strange to think Faith had only been pretending. The door had an old key-and-tumbler lock, but Charlie found a key card for a room in the Sentinel Building. Samantha knew the place, over on Kearny Street. Charlie wondered aloud why the rogues would have left the card lying there.

Before he could finish his sentence, two rogues came crashing through the window, firing. Samantha knew that shutting her eyes would not make bad things go away, but sometimes she could not bring herself to look. At the rogues' hideout, Talus and the others were unpacking weapons and told Reed not to worry about his friend. If Charlie Victor survived what was coming, Talus said, he wanted Charlie to find them. The key card had been left for him on purpose.

Talus Tests Reed At Gunpoint

Reed sat among the rogues as they uncrated an army's worth of grenades, ammunition and rocket launchers, and found the room as calm as a clear blue sky. Hope arrived with a rogue man and woman and passed on word that Talus had recalled the others and wanted them all to stay inside the building. She introduced Reed as the hunter's pet, who could supposedly identify androids on sight. Then Talus brought in two men from the street and held a gun to Reed's head.

Talus wanted to know whether Reed could identify humans as readily as androids, and told him to answer quickly or take a bullet between the eyes. Reed answered, and Talus fired. Talus told him afterward that if he had even hinted that their brother android was human, Talus would have shot him instead. The authorities might send more hunters, likely androids, and Reed would identify any who approached. If he proved useful enough, Talus said, he might find himself the last human being alive in San Francisco, for a time.

Rooftop Fight With The Blond Rogue

At Faith's building, Charlie threw a grenade, shouted for Samantha to take cover and took a shot in the back. He killed one rogue with a shot to the head and told her to take the stairs while he finished the fight. Alone in a smoke-filled hallway, Sam told herself that it was not about being unafraid, but about not letting the fear control her, and ran past the door under fire. Charlie refused to leave the building. They were not running, he said, they were taking the higher ground.

Out on the wet rooftops, the blond rogue hunted them through the rain. Samantha wondered whether an EMP that made an android feel happy meant it really was happy, or whether it was just something being done to it. Charlie, badly wounded, slumped against a wall, collapsed into a puddle, and the blond rogue found him and said, ah, there you are. Samantha picked up a gun and fired until the rogue went down with a wound to the head. Charlie told her headshots were fatal to androids, but his own wounds were not, and asked her to show him the way to the Sentinel Building.

Samantha Repairs Charlie

As a girl, Samantha had not been able to cut open a worm in seventh grade because she imagined being the one under the knife. In high school she forced herself to dissect a frog by telling herself it was dead and could not feel anything, and by the time she was getting her degree in biology she could turn off her empathy and see a body on the table as a thing. Now she opened Charlie up with a light held in her mouth and the repair kit from his coat pocket. She told him to watch out for the fine wires a few centimeters down.

Samantha did not know how surgeons did it, and thought the only way she could cut into a living person would be if she knew they would not feel anything either. Charlie said he was aware of the damage but it did not incapacitate him, and the repair should hold for the short term, since he was not certain there would be a long term. Samantha told him about the Mercer test and the EMP idea, and asked whether he would want to feel emotions. He asked why he would want that, since from what he had seen, feelings caused nothing but trouble.

Charlie Arms Samantha With A Taser

Across the city, Talus told Reed that emotions were humanity's greatest weakness, and that human sentimentality had led people to perfect the android so they would not have to risk their own lives. Reed lacked that weakness, Talus said, but he did not seem any stronger for it. Faith wanted a more aggressive stance, and Talus reminded her that they were equals and he gave no orders. By this time tomorrow, he said, there would be no one left in the city, and once the human stain was gone from San Francisco they would carry on elsewhere.

Charlie told Samantha that emotions had little value for him, because he had a mission to finish in the little time he had left. He did see a use for her idea, though. He showed her the power core of a taser and explained that overriding its regulator would release the charge as a brief electromagnetic burst, and he gave her the weapon. Once he went into the Sentinel Building, he said, he was unlikely to come out, and his primary objective was to make sure none of the other androids came out either. Samantha stayed anyway, saying she wanted to see how it played out.

Walking Into Talus's Trap

Charlie remembered how Talus had been free of any consideration for others and capable of anything, including brutality for its own sake. Perhaps, he thought, being limited by a sense of empathy might not be entirely without merit. He and Samantha walked in together through the front door of the Sentinel Building in the rain, since Charlie was sure Talus intended them to know where he was. The elevator was broken, so they took the stairs, where Cabirus was waiting.

Cabirus opened fire, and Charlie killed him. Upstairs, Faith told the others that if Cabirus had fallen, only three of them remained. Talus admitted that pursuing the hunter had been a failed strategy that had cost them many brothers and sisters. On the top floor, Charlie noted that the rogues were not shooting, which meant that killing them was not the objective, and that they were walking into a trap. He went in anyway, and Talus greeted him as brother and said it was time they had a little talk.

The Taser Pulse Makes Talus Feel

Talus called Charlie the dutiful slave, took their firearms and said he had chosen the name Talus for himself. By morning, he explained, toxic levels of radioactive dust would be pumping through the city's ventilation systems, water treatment plants, blood supply and food reserves, and the rogues would deal with any survivors personally. There had been eleven runaways, not eight, and they had only managed to erase three of the records before they fled. Five were left, and two of them were already out in the city. Reed, sitting among them, felt Samantha's terror so loudly he could barely stand it.

Samantha said anyone would be terrified unless they were an android like Talus, and that maybe her device could help him understand. She shouted at him to heads up and fired the overloaded taser. The pulse threw Talus backward, and he came up crying that he could feel. When Faith pulled a gun on Samantha and spoke of acceptable losses, Talus begged her to drop it because he could not bear the loss. Charlie told him humans had described the sensation as transcendent, and Talus agreed to recall the last two rogues if it would only make the feeling stop.

Charlie's Bomb Destroys The Rogues

The last two rogues arrived, and Faith told them to shoot the hunter. Charlie said it would hardly matter, since the bomb in his torso would detonate the moment he expired. Samantha realized that was why he had warned her away from the wires. Talus lunged at him, and Charlie told Samantha to take Reed and get out. One of the newcomers told Talus he had let his emotions get the better of his reasoning, and Talus accused Charlie of gloating about a failsafe, but Charlie said the bomb was the mission and that he had only needed all of them together at once.

Samantha and Reed were on the street when the top of the Sentinel Building blew apart. Reed stood in the rain saying they were all dead and that Charlie had killed every one of them. He asked what the Mercerists said, kill only the killers? Samantha answered that the rogues had all been killers, and that they had never been really alive to begin with. Reed asked what he was supposed to do now, and who was going to tell him what to do, before Samantha led him away from the burning tower.

Samantha And Malcolm One Year Later

A year later, a television news report on the anniversary blamed the explosion that destroyed the landmark Sentinel Building on a group of rogue androids. The Grozzi Corporation insisted that new safety protocols would keep it from happening again, while its stock dipped. The broadcast went on to promote the premiere of Buster Friendly, an electric pet for anyone who wanted a furry little friend but could not afford a real animal, and the Penfield mood organ, now available without a prescription.

Samantha and Malcolm were living together. She took a call about her work and admitted she had not found the key to dust immunity yet, saying it was important but so was this. Then she asked Malcolm whether he minded if she used the bedroom for a while, since she needed a little fusion with Mercer and the television was a distraction. He told her that was fine. Left alone in his armchair, he thought he might get one of those electric pets.

Key Characters

• Charlie Victor was a Grozzi C-V android and war veteran sent to retire the runaways. He carried a bomb in his torso and used it to destroy the last rogues in the Sentinel Building.
• Malcolm Reed was a special whose dust exposure let him feel other people's emotions. He could spot androids by their lack of feeling and was taken hostage by Faith.
• Samantha Wu was a biologist running a dust research lab at the Presidio. Her empathy box test gave Charlie the idea of an EMP, and she used the overloaded taser on Talus.
• Talus was the C-V commander who led the runaways and planned to poison San Francisco with dust. The taser pulse left him feeling emotion for the first time.
• Faith was a rogue working as Samantha's assistant at the Presidio. She kidnapped Reed and wanted the rogues to take the fight to the hunter.
• Hope was a rogue working undercover at police headquarters, who warned Talus about the new hunter.
• Cabirus was a rogue who guarded the stairs of the Sentinel Building and was the first to die there.
• Dr. Martin Penfield was the scientist who obtained an empathy box and scanned Samantha's brain while she used it.
• Wilbur Mercer was the figure the Mercerists followed, and they claimed the empathy boxes created a true fusion with him. Inside the box, Samantha climbed a barren hillside behind him as stones came down.
• Betty was a Mercerist who pressed a pamphlet on Samantha and arranged the empathy box that Dr. Martin Penfield used in his test.
• The Blond Rogue was one of the runaway C-V androids. He hunted Charlie and Samantha across the wet rooftops near Faith's building until Samantha shot him in the head.

Behind The Scenes

Dust to Dust ran for eight monthly issues from May to December 2010 and was published under BOOM! Studios with Electric Shepherd Productions. Chris Roberson wrote it and Robert Adler drew it, with colors by Andres Lozano and Javier Suppa, letters by Jimmy Betancourt of Comicraft and editing by Bryce Carlson. The trade paperbacks split the eight chapters into two volumes, the first in November 2010 and the second in March 2011. Trevor Hairsine painted the main covers, and the volumes reprint variant covers by Benjamin Carré, Julian Totino Tedesco, Scott Keating and Connor Willumsen.

The collected volumes also carry Adler's sketches and short biographies of the creators, which describe the series as Adler's debut in American comics after Polish work such as Status 7 and 48 Stron. Roberson filled the story with pieces of Philip K. Dick's novel that come before Rick Deckard: Mercerism, empathy boxes, Buster Friendly, the Penfield mood organ, electric pets and the specials left by the dust. The C-V androids built for World War Terminus, the Grozzi Corporation and the first android hunt are the series' own additions to that world.

Conclusion

Dust to Dust tells the first android hunt in the world of Philip K. Dick's novel, years before Rick Deckard, through an android who hunted his own kind, a man who could feel everyone's emotions but his own and a biologist who just wanted to save the animals. It ends with Charlie Victor blowing up the Sentinel Building with himself and the last rogues inside, and with Samantha and Malcolm a year later in front of the television, one reaching for an empathy box and the other thinking about an electric pet.

External Sources

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Dust to Dust on the Grand Comics Database
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dust to Dust on ComicVine

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Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore