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by Charles Carreon
Joe Chip has a problem. He went to the moon
with his boss, and got killed in a terrorist bomb attack. Or his boss was
killed. He’s not sure, but either way, it’s a problem. It’s 1992 in a
world a little different from ours. It’s still earth, and earth is still
populated by people. But there are lots of psychics on the planet now, and
the moon is colonized.
If Joe himself is dead, he must be in
cold-pack in a Swiss half-life “moratorium,” where dead people can spend
their half-life in a dreamlike space, and occasionally visit with
relatives through a sort of psychic intercom. It’s a common thing to have
relatives in cold-pack, and Joe’s boss, Glen Runciter, still meets to
discuss business matters with his lovely dead wife Ella, who half-lives in
the exclusive Beloved Brethren Moratorium, a Swiss facility that is
supposed to be among the best. Ella Runciter died in her twenties, but
Glen Runciter thinks so highly of her that he has never considered
remarrying, despite his wealth.
Runciter Associates is a psychic security
company, and Joe Chip is Glen Runciter’s top man. Although Joe was always
broke, his life wasn’t entirely crazy until he met his new girlfriend, Pat
Conley. Everything went crazy shortly after Joe introduced Pat to Runciter.
Although both Joe and G.G. Ashwood, a renowned psychic talent scout,
agreed that Pat had a powerful psychic talent, Runciter questioned whether
he should even hire Pat, because he usually hired “inertials,” who block
the psychic talents of “precogs” and “teeps” hired by Runciter’s nemesis,
the Hollis organization of criminal psychics. But Pat wasn’t a psi-blocker.
She displayed a new type of talent, the ability to change the future, not
just foresee it. She could send people on alternative reality trips, to
places a lot like the present, but with important differences.
Runciter had always refused to take jobs on
the moon because of the security risks inherent in being away from earth,
far from help. However, ever the businessman, he broke his rule to pick up
a big contract job working for Stanton Mick, a plum client Runciter was
eager to sign up for a very fat fee. Stanton Mick had told Runciter he
needed immediate, massive assistance to block the efforts of a band of
psychic spies who were invading the privacy of his lunar planned
community. But shortly after Runciter and his inertials arrived, Mick came
to meet Runciter in a conference room. Mick acted and talked strangely in
a metallic voice in a grandstanding manner, setting everyone on edge.
Slowly, it dawned on Runciter and Joe Chip that this wasn’t Mick; rather,
it was an android made in his image. Alas, they didn’t figure this out
until the android floated off the floor to gain destructive altitude, and
an instant later, detonated.
Immediately after discovering that the
blast had apparently killed Runciter, Joe Chip assumed control of Runciter
Associates. He chartered a rocket and flew the survivors to Switzerland
with Runciter’s body, where they booked him into the Beloved Brethren
Moratorium, and tried to set up a half-life session. But Runciter wouldn’t
revive into half-life, and Joe experienced the pain of losing his father
figure.
After Runciter’s death Joe struggles to run
the company, but he has some impediments. Like Philip K. Dick, Joe Chip
finds himself habitually broke, and regularly abused by the his coin-op
apartment door, which won’t let him out without depositing a poscred, and
makes nasty remarks when he loses his temper. Sometimes he has to call
friends to come by and visit, and pay to get in. Then he can borrow money
from them to get himself out. But these problems are small, because one by
one Joe’s friends are dying, turning into mummified ragbags of bone and
hair. This horrific transformation occurs within a few hours after each
individual quietly separates themselves from the group, seeking solitude
and stillness.
Not only are Joe’s friends turning into
mummies, all mechanical objects, except his apartment front door, are
regressing to older models and falling apart. His TV turns into an old
tube radio. The elevator in his building regressed from a modern
self-serve box to a tiny lift with an accordion steel grate, and seemed to
silently suggest: “Take the stairs.” Joe’s car turns into an old car, and
even as he negotiates to sell it, the car ages into an even older model of
jalopy that is virtually worthless. When he goes to the airport, all he
can find to fly is an old biplane.
Due to a series of messages from Runciter
that mysteriously appear on bathroom walls and elsewhere, Joe Chip learns
that he is probably dead and merely half-living in the Beloved Brethren
Moratorium, where Ella Runciter is also in half-life. To reverse the decay
of all forms, and prevent himself from turning into a mummy, Runciter
tells Joe to get UBIK in the aerosol can. Unfortunately, every time Joe is
close to getting a can of aerosol-spray UBIK, he finds only old-fashioned,
regressed versions of UBIK that contain toxic ingredients, or in one case,
a substantial quantity of pure gold suspended in mineral oil. Fortunately,
this last form of UBIK is worth a lot of money in the half-life realm, and
Joe is able to trade it for a plane flight for Demoines, Iowa, where
Runciter’s funeral is happening. Joe is still not sure that he is dead, so
he of course wants to attend Runciter’s funeral.
After Runciter’s funeral, one by one, Joe’s
friends just keep disappearing, hiding themselves from their friends so
they can turn into psychic tumbleweeds and blow away into the void. The
only one who isn’t dying is Pat Conley, Joe’s strange girlfriend. She
thinks she’s doing the whole weird trip with her powers, thinks she’s
immune from the death that’s stalking him, and drenches Joe with
passive-aggressive cruelty while observing Joe’s painful effort to just go
to his room and die. But Joe makes it to his room, where Runciter is
waiting for him with a can of UBIK aerosol:
“Opening a drawer on the vanity table, he hastily brought
out a spray can with bright stripes, balloons and lettering glorifying its
shiny surfaces. ‘Ubik,’ Runciter said, he shook the can mightily, then
stood before Joe, aiming it at him. ‘Don’t thank me for this,’ he said,
and sprayed prolongedly left and right; the air flickered and shimmered,
as if bright particles of light had been released, as if the sun’s energy
sparkled here in this worn-out elderly hotel room.”
Shortly after this rejuvenating Ubik
experience, Joe meets his true antagonist – Jory, a malevolent psychic
juvenile delinquent who haunts the moratorium’s half-life realm. Jory is a
projective psychotic who generates deceptive “realities” that seduce
half-life dwellers into unreal realms and consumes the dregs of their
half-life vitality. Dick’s description of Jory’s psychic attack on Joe
Chip is bluntly physical and eerily frightening:
“Snarling, Jory bit him. The great shovel teeth fastened
deep into Joe’s right hand. They hung on as, meanwhile, Jory raised his
head, lifting Joe’s hand with his jaw; Jory stared at him with unwinking
eyes, snoring wetly as he tried to close his jaws. The teeth sank deeper
and Joe felt the pain of it throughout him. He’s eating me, he realized.
‘You can’t,’ he said aloud; he hit Jory on the snout, punching again and
again.”
Shortly after the Jory encounter, from
which Joe barely escapes with his life, he sees a pretty girl going down
the street, and in a desperate hope to have one last pleasant moment, he
strikes up a conversation with her and asks her to dinner. You can almost
see Phil Dick counting his Dexedrine pills, getting hungry for a burger
after days of speeding and typing, and figuring out he’d better finish
this story up quick, before he consumes the last of his inspiration. The
story picks up pace immediately after the unexpected encounter with the
girl, which leads to the hasty revelation that she is Runciter’s dead
wife. Ella Runciter tells Joe that his friends have been killed by Jory,
but that, good news – he’s been granted a perpetual supply of UBIK. She
explains to him that an aerosol can of UBIK is actually “A portable
negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit
powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given
a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which
creates a centripital tendency to them so that they cohere rather than
dissipate.” UBIK, at 212 (Vintage 1991).
Immortality in a spray can? What else would
we expect from Phil Dick?
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