The other Philip K. Dick

Some very short science fiction

This is something new, I just finished up a science fiction short story that I had kicking around. Let me if this anything you’d like to see more of, or if it was more a thumbs down thing.

I had driven 400 miles from Chicago to meet the other Philip K. Dick, and here we sat in a cafe in northern rural Kansas, he was dressed how a middle aged rural Gen Xer might imagine a 19^th century detective would dress, Deerstalker hat out of Sherlock Holmes, balding, a dress shirt obviously from a thrift store, and a wide 70s tie. The other Philip K. Dick had a thin weak mustache, and a nervous mouth like a Steve Buscemi character, I was not impressed, and thought “this is the other Philip K. Dick?” He did bare a faint resemblance to Philip K. Dick in the face, if Philip K. Dick had been a loser who worked at a 711 in rural Kansas. He came in carrying hundreds of printed out pages of manuscript and some kind of tablet device with primitive homemade v.r googles plugged into to them. He sat there nervously staring at his thin uninspired latte I had ordered for him, so I knew I needed to start the conversation. “Ron, if everything I hear about you is true, we are all set for life, you are a millionaire, and a famous man, and I am not going to put you on man, I want a part of that, show me what you've got.”

Shyly he showed me the first page of his manuscript “The Man Who Never Was,” it was garbage, stilted childish simplistic dialog, wooden writing, something was wrong, a faint shimmering in the air in the air made made everything look as though it was being looked at through heat waves on the pavement for a moment, I felt sick, the other Philip K. Dick looked sick, he said “excuse me Don I need to go to the bathroom.” I nodded, glumly. As the other Philip K, Dick went off the bathroom I thought to myself, how could I have been so wrong, Chon, my contact in Kansas, assured me the new Philip K. Dick was the real deal, indeed the new Philip K. Dick,” for the 21^st century. I had to get to get to bottom of it, so I slid the manuscript over and opened it to a random page, no harm in looking, I drove this far, right? I started reading and it peeled my eyes back, an intense poetic passage about a man dealing with an incursion of multiple levels of reality while working as a cashier at a rural Kansas 711, I was startled, “aha maybe it's true he is the other Philp K.Dick.” I heard the bathroom door open with a squeak, I quickly guiltily slid the manuscript back into the place.

The other Philip K. Dick looked at me hostility, “Don you have been bad, very bad, aren't you ashamed of yourself?” “I have?” I gulped nervously. I KNOW you have Don, don't fuck with me or patronize me, I was watching you in the bathroom, you looked at my real manuscripts, I was hoping to avoid this. “Ron, I don't know how to put this tactfully but that sounds kind of paranoid don't you think, the door was shut?” I said. “Ok asshole...” he started off in a louder voice, the other patrons turned around nervously to discreetly stare at our table, some seemed to be reaching for their cell phones. “Shhh, pipe down I,” I said in low tone, “do you want them to call the cops, explain yourself, I don't have all day to talk to a nut case.”

“Ok asshole, he said in a lower tone “this is going to sound kind of unbelievable, but you are going to have to bear with me while I tell my story, OK?” “OK,” I nodded. “I hope you aren't some kind of total newb to science fiction, you've read Valis, right?” “Yeah I have read Valis,” I said. “Well kind of by accident I hacked together something like that tablet the girl has in the story.” “Umm, OK, I said,” while thinking to myself we have a real nutter here, a talented nutter, but a nutter. “See a couple years ago I was taking some computer coding classes and basic electrical engineering classes at our local community college, I was also reading through all the Philip K. Dick stories, I am kind of obsessed.”

I bet you are I thought, while I hopefully discreetly looked down at my smart watch to check my messages. “I previewed this before I came here, so I know how it comes out, but one thing I have discovered is knowing how things come out, doesn't mean you can change them.” “Anyway as I was saying I was taking classes on coding and electrical engineering, and reading Philip K. Dick, and tech magazines online all night on my phone while I worked at a 711, I didn't have much of a life.” You can say that again, I thought. “I had downloaded some open source bio feedback programs that work on my tablet based on monitoring brainwaves with electrodes, and hacked it together to run with some off the shelf v.r. googles I got at Best Buy.”

So this is how subgenuis schizos entertain themselves in the sticks, I thought. “So anyway I rigged all this up and started working on a program that would render a 3D visualization of anything I thought while wearing the electrodes and googles.” Sure buddy I thought, I am wasting my time listening to this garbage when I could be hearing a better pitch from a sane person, I thought. “It worked better than I ever could have hoped, it created waking immersive dreamscapes, and I became obsessed with those and started spending more and more of my free time in them.” You need a hobby, like mountain biking in the fresh air. “I kept adding features like biofeedback monitoring and subliminal flickering images in the background to entrain my brainwaves to different frequencies.” Cukcoo, Cuckoo, I thought. “Hey are you paying attention, Don,” the other Philip K. Dick, said “this is the good part.”

A concentrated beam of light shot out of his homeade VR contraption and damn it if there wasn’t a real as life hologram of a burning robot head rolling towards my foot. “So you see, the other Philip K. Dick said, I have some properties of Philip K. Dick’s multiple reality worlds that just shot it’s light on the floor,” the burning robot head then danced its way out of the room. “So you see Don, my creative powers are more vast than you estimated Mr. City Slicker man, the other Philip K. Dick said, knowing he had turned the tables. “So I suggest you actually listen to me, when you get back to Chicago you will remember nothing of this encounter. You will studiously forget everything that happened, and ignore any other entreaties from your contact for Kansas, understand?”

Oh I understood alright, this old loony might come after me with a weapon he read about in The Penultimate Truth or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and the damn thing somehow would work. I knew once I got the route programmed into the bot drive that I had a lot of un-remembering to do least he find me and sweep me beyond total immersion into the crazy world of the other Philip K. Dick.

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