Ubik

by Philip K. Dick

“Skip the rest and tell me which of Hollis’ people is missing now.” “S. Dole Melipone,” the technician said. “What? Melipone’s gone? You kid me.” “I not kid you,” the technician assured him.

What happened to this whole subplot? Where did all the missing psis go? Also what's with this technician's weird diction? "I not kid you"? Is that supposed to be futuristic?

a worried-looking clerical individual with nearly opaque glasses and wearing a tabby-fur blazer and pointed yellow shoes waited at the reception counter,

Distracting but endearing: why do these future people dress so strangely? Reminiscent of the story where Dick sends scientists to the past to kidnap a sci-fi writer and they dress completely wrong. But in reverse I guess?

He felt foolish, talking like this; normally he had no theological convictions. But the half-life experience was real and it had made theologians out of all of them.

“Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t.

Joe said, “Did he have on green felt knickers, gray golf socks, badger-hide open-midriff blouse and imitation patent-leather pumps?”

He handed the matchfolder to Tippy Jackson. “Write them ’stant mail.”

“Isn’t Walt Disney’s head supposed to be on the fifty-cent piece?” Sammy said. “Either Disney’s,” Al said, “or if it’s an older one, then Fidel Castro’s. Let’s see it.”

“I came over to Ubik after trying weak, out-of-date reality supports.

One has to pay attention to such admonitions, he realized, if one expects to stay alive—or half-alive. Whichever it is.

He thought, There is no way we can adapt to their viewpoint, their moral, political, sociological environment. To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agitators that this time segment has yet had to deal with. Bliss is absolutely right.

Which can never fly or escape. Can only descend step by step into what is deranged and foul. Into the world of the tomb which a perverse entity surrounded by its own filth inhabits. The thing we call Pat.

“Thanks,” Joe said to the spray can. We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.