A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

ONCE A GUY stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair.

Jerry had at an earlier date sprayed metal paint over all the windows, though, to keep out the light; the illumination for the room came from a pole lamp into which he had screwed nothing but spot lamps, which shone day and night, so as to abolish time for him and his friends.

They passed on through the dark living room, the three of them, and the rerun of a now gone moment winked out and died forever.

A man called up, “How do we stop them, sir?” “Kill the pushers,” Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.

What am I actually? he asked himself. He wished, momentarily, for his scramble suit.

In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze.

Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.

Every pay phone in the world was tapped. Or if it wasn’t, some crew somewhere just hadn’t gotten around to it.

In addition to everyone else, Fred in his scramble suit naturally reported on himself. If he did not, his superior—and through him the whole law-enforcement apparatus—would become aware of who Fred was, suit or not.

“We don’t know it’s Barris, and anyhow there may be more to Barris than ‘burned-out acid head.’

All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.

Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind—everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now.

What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives? Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action.

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate.

But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

Because I don’t want to have God boom out at me when I die at the age of eighty-six, ‘So you’re the little boy who stole the three Coke bottles off the Coca-Cola truck when it was parked in the 7-11 lot back in 1962, and you’ve got a lot of fast talking to do.’”

The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I’m the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me?

“Do you take Substance D?” the left-hand medical deputy said. “That question,” the other said, “is moot because it’s taken for granted that in your work you’re compelled to. So don’t answer. Not that it’s incriminating, but it’s simply moot.”

“Between hemispheres. If there’s damage to the left hemisphere, where the linguistic skills are normally located, then sometimes the right hemisphere will fill in to the best of its ability.”

ARCTOR: (Logically) But it should be ten. There are no seven- or eight-speed bikes. Not that I ever heard of. What do you suppose happened to the missing gears?

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

“Yes,” she said. “I can dig it—little spring flowers, with yellow in them. That first come up.”

“Hey, man,” he said, “can I go with you to Oregon? When you do take off finally?” She smiled at him, gently and with acute tenderness, with the answer no. And he understood, from knowing her, that she meant it. And it would not change.

I’m slushed; my brain is slushed. This is not real. I’m not believing this, watching what is me, is Fred—that was Fred down there without his scramble suit; that’s how Fred appears without the suit!

And then he thought, What the hell am I talking about? I must be nuts. I know Bob Arctor; he’s a good person. He’s up to nothing. At least nothing unsavory. In fact, he thought, he works for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, covertly.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk.

Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card.

“Bob, you know something . . .” Luckman said at last. “I used to be the same age as everyone else.” “I think so was I,” Arctor said. “I don’t know what did it.” “Sure, Luckman,” Arctor said, “you know what did it to all of us.” “Well, let’s not talk about it.”

With great fury Fred slammed the holos ahead two and a half hours. How long does this garbage go on? he asked himself. All day? Forever?

I resemble that worm which crawls through dust, Lives in the dust, eats dust Until a passerby’s foot crushes it.

“I’m not here for that reason,” Barris said. “The man is sick. Brain-damaged. From Substance D. The reason I am here—”

“Substance D. It often causes that, functionally. This is what we expected; this is what the tests confirm. Damage having taken place in the normally dominant left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is attempting to compensate for the impairment.

“Will this go away,” Fred interrupted, “when I get off Substance D?” “Probably,” the psychologist on the left said, nodding. “It’s a functional impairment.” The other man said, “It may be organic damage. It may be permanent. Time’ll tell, and only after you are off Substance D for a long while. And off entirely.”

I’ve seen the last of Arctor and Luckman and Jerry Fabin and Charles Freck and most of all Donna Hawthorne. I’ll never see any of my friends again, for the rest of eternity. It’s over.

“Mr. Barris,” Hank said, “you will not be released, pending our study of this material. You’re being charged, as a formality to keep you available, with giving false information to the authorities knowingly. This is, of course, only a pretext for your own safety, and we all realize that, but the formal charge will be lodged anyhow.

“Possibly two brain cells still light up. But that’s about all. Mostly short circuits and sparks.”

Fred said, “I get some sort of bonus for this, for what happened to me?” “No. Read your penal code. An officer who willingly becomes an addict and does not promptly report it is subject to a misdemeanor charge—a fine of three thousand dollars and/or six months. You’ll probably just be fined.”

“I’ve got two kids,” Fred said. “Two girls.” “I don’t believe you do; you’re not supposed to.” “Maybe not.” He had begun to try to figure out when withdrawal would begin, and then he began to try to figure how many tabs of Substance D he had hidden here and there.

“I’m who?” he said, staring at Hank the scramble suit facing him. “I’m Bob Arctor?” He could not believe it. It made no sense to him.

“You’re very bad off; maybe Jim Barris poisoned you. We really are interested in Barris, not you; the scanning of the house was primarily to keep on Barris. We hoped to draw him in here . . . and we did.”

“Just sit, Bob. Bob, Fred, whatever. Take comfort—we did get the bugger and he’s a—well, what you just now called us. You know it’s worth it. Isn’t it? To entrap him? A thing like that, whatever it is he’s doing?”

“After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn’t seen God.

Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping.” “Like the rest of us.”

And the journey, so awful for him, so costly, so evidently without point, would be finished.

All the circuits are welded shut, she thought. Melted and fused. And no one is going to get them open, no matter how hard they try. And they are going to try.

In this world you pay for tilting with evil in cold, hard cash.

When the senile patient awakens in the morning and asks for his mother, remind him that she is long since dead, that he is over eighty years old and living in a convalescent home, and that this is 1992 and not 1913 and that he must face reality

“Will I ever be like I was again?” Bruce asked. “What you were brought you here. If you become what you were again then sooner or later it’d bring you here again.