Do Electric Dreams Count Android Sheep?

Nick Ruckard sits in the ergonomic position so familiar to him since becoming a cult killer, strapped into it like a pocket rocket hover cycle, reading the blinking screen. His eyelids blink in unison with the gentle blue screen bruised black with the two simple words.

“Something’s Coming.”

Blinking in Copperplate Gothic Bold font. Ruckard had always realized the fallacy, and phallic, of the world’s great mind-controlling orders—from his insides.

He wasn’t wearing the title cult killer when he brought down the biggest one. The 800 million followers had all fled their faith in one day—when the truth came out. Ruckard had simply been a time pilot with a journalist’s degree giving him the pole position in the search for evidentiary fact. The Historical Veracity Project—the new funders had called it and Ruckard was its first pioneering sojourner.

During his studies at Berkeley, before his marriage to Aliyah Ewe, all he had ever dreamed of involved waves that had fallen thousands of years before his own birth. He thought it a memory of birthing or a premonition of future instances. He had surfed out of his mother’s birth canal on that first amniotic wave feeling his destiny—his need for discovery—but not knowing the path. That was true. They had called him an Indigo —back in the day when it was en vogue —that had been 2002. He was now well into his mid-life at 71, but when you live to be 500 who really cared; just an indigo child.

“Something’s Coming.”

The screen’s lettering ticked in a larger font.

It was his electric dream of waves, flotsam and jetsam, that kept the synapses popping every moment of his life—even in sleep where he would dream of electric sheep with wavery wool and euphoric bleats. The year 2073; a good year.

Here at the beach house, he and Aliyah spent marvellous days, bobbing in the waves and wash, floating under full moons and enjoying the refurbished air and untarnished love. The smog fog scrubbed pure after the monstrous oil disaster of 2010 in the Gulf had required the planet’s greatest minds to finally cut off the citizens’ dependency on liquefied vegetation from eons gone by.

The Los Angeles Basin—a Garden of Eden, a very real paradise, without the yellow leviathan’s breath constantly inflicting cancers on its populous. With the elimination of disease and respiratory illnesses the corporations realized the need for new job creation, new methods for creating profit—the clean air and garden produce created longevity in humans as the enduring optimal result—but the corporations of the time had realized this new reality too late.

The Historical Veracity Project had been but a step on the staircase that was bringing mankind to fuller self-actualization. The benefits of the return to hunter/gatherer status had created electric power from walkers, roller bladers, skateboarders, wheelchair recipients, even gardeners and every human physical action caused a reaction that created more power. It was the discovery of sustainability.

It was Einstein Witcomb, aptly named for he bore the same child-like blue eyes; starkly staunch white coiffeur and genius of his namesake, though it was a genius of a different variety, who discovered the only rechargeable energy factory any human being would ever need. His bust lay on the mantle of every cultured cultee’s fireplace around the world. The factory was a small storage cell with the infinite ability to store energy created by any kind of friction, muscle movement (spasm or voluntary) that only required a pad to be placed in the vicinity of the action causing the reaction of stored power.

Witcomb had brought the formula to begin all formulas to the world.

Energy Equals Human Animation (E=HA), and the whole planet could with the drop of a single foot generate power for the future—no drilling, no oil and a planet without scars but from the processes of the natural universe and pyromaniacs who participated in the criminal activity of arson. Most of this regime of old arsonists brandished their Sectarian roots in fire—for that is what they wished—Apocalypse Now .

British Petroleum had been the first fatality, then Exxon—then all of them. The dinosaur corporations had their bones picked cleanly and the only fossils that remained were the glass skyscrapers of corporate offices that gleamed silvery in the clear skies of a renewed earth. The new funders filled the empty cavities of the glass behemoths’ office teeth and started to go to work with the new technology.

That was over 50 years ago.

“Something’s Coming.”

The pica count was growing in size. Ruckard slid out of his embryonic position and stood upright.

“Liyah, you home?”

His wife usually arrived home during the middle hours of the day. Her’s was a life of floristry and fauna. She loved creating new hybrids of rose, hyacinth, rhododendron, and tulip. It allowed Ruckard the luxury of never having to bring his equal half, for there were no betters now, any bouquets of flashing flora—she was never impressed by the arrangements he'd delivered for the first five years of their union. He stopped bringing flowers because there was no point to his action. She didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah, Nick-bits, I’m here in the kitchen.” She purred back at him. “What’s up?”

She strode into the office/bedroom wearing nothing but bra and mini-skorts for it was the way she was. There were times she strode in nude simply to keep things extemporaneous between her and this man—the love of her life—for Ruckard was. She loved his stories after each return from the past—not everyone was married to a man who’d saved the world from Black Simon.

The glass vase filled with a dozen blossoms of her newest graft. Rosedendrons crashed on the obsidian tile that tied the alcove-mirrored entry of their master suite at the moment she saw the flashing words on her lover’s screen.

“Damn,” she swore, “that’s the same shit that sent me packing for home.”

“That’s why I called for you,” Nick replied, “What do you think it all means?”

“HellifIknow, but it can’t be good if it’s on my screen and your screen and every frackin’ screen in the world.”

Ruckard scratched the top of his black shroud—he liked wearing the dreads—and muttered. “Merde, Merde, Merde and Scheize. Liyah, this is not good—or it is good but my sensory is just not seeing it. I always see it.”

Aliyah knew from previous dilemmas that her mate would figure it out, or at least he always had, but she didn’t like the expletives that always came with it.

“Just figure it out—you always do.”

“This is different,” Ruckard began, “because this ‘something’ isn’t just any old thing, or way of thinking, this is something big. I’m still hungry, so something will have to wait. Do you wanna fix something up or should I?”

“Let me clean this mess up.” Aliyah replied, shaking her head at the shattered and splayed bouquet. “And I want to take a sprower—you wanna cook?”

“Yep. Chicken ala Strawberries it is.”

Ruckard put a wet slimy lick on his woman’s lips and proceeded to their Eatchen. He pondered the trips of the past and how he’d seen the origins of Vatican and Khan, Buddhism and Mormonism—he’d been sent to all origins and kept his cool through vaudeo record. The auditory and visual were impossible to deny—the truth had set them free—all of them.

The Catholics had seen and heard the deception by the father of simony. Simon Magus had proclaimed himself Simon Peter and birthed the faith of Inquisition and witch hunts. The Buddhist calm had seen nothing but anger and temper tantrums thrown by an overeating only child—the Mormons had seen and heard the murdering, lusty, drunken son of a snake oil salesmen who was tired of being poor and wanted as many wives as old king Solomon. And so the list had gone—the way of the dodo.

Ruckard had cleared the muddy waters and brought a new clarity to the springs of faith. It was here his destiny revealed indigo—crystal blue persuasion. His way of being right, narrow; his swath of destruction, wide. It was why he loved the waters, the waves and the sensation of floating in warmth and bliss—the oceans. He had found the narrow path for the world with the help of the new funders’ time travel.

This is different , he thought, as he eviscerated the skin from chicken flesh and chopped strawberry from stem. He whiffed the scent of his woman—she always sprayed lavender and peaches in just the right places. She did it for him, he knew. She did it for the pleasure they both knew in the waves of their satin sheeting, billowing during the dark times tho’ certainly the bright light of day often saw similar tidal swaths of love and lust.

“How’s supper coming?”

“Almost ready to laser the bird, strawberries are done—want rice?”

“Whatever—you decide.”

“Li, do you know what phildickian means?”

“Nope.”

“Philip K. Dick was a 20^th century storyteller. He died really young—only 53—but the man had some sort of...how do I say this...connection. Well, he called it a ‘Pink Light that transmitted directly into his consciousness.’”

“How do you know this stuff—for the love of Einstein, why do I ask?” Indigo blue had always been her favourite colour so when she called him out on his abilities—it was a love-love kinda thing.

“Okay, you’re feeling me then. Photographic memory boy is squawking from the box. Dick experienced a bunch of visions, not like bogus Mormon boy Joseph Smith, this guy actually saw these things, I went back and checked, Li. I went back to March 16, 1974 and watched this man come to a peace. His kids had it, back in the day, on his official website, and it read, ‘released me from every thrall, inner and outer. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing."

“I saw him go through this crap, Li. But I didn’t want to believe it.”

“What are saying—that this something’s coming is from some whack job sci-fi writer from the hippie days of neverlore?”

“I didn’t report it, Liyah. I never spoke of this crap because I didn’t want to believe it myself. Li, this could be the end of the funders . This could be the end of us!”

“Oh stop it, Nicky boy. It will never be the end of us—for Man Jesus’ sake, we’re only in our seventies. We have another few centuries of indigo play left.”

“Aliyah, you are not FEELING me! The last years of Dick’s life were filled with 2-3-74 numerology trips and one of his last quotes read ‘I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken.’ Think about that, would ya? What am I saying?”

“You mean, The Jerusalem Project, don’t you?”

“Aha moment, you’re listening, finally.”

“Nick, remember that fuddy, duddy old flick we watched the other night?”

“Coccoon ?”

Aliyah Ewe Ruckard speaks of a long dead actor named Gutenberg being unveiled to the most amazing sex in his life without the need of touch, taste, smell, sight or sound. Aliyah explains to Nick, “that if all your worries come true—so what—what can you do about it?”

Her Indigo man cannot be consoled and Nick thinks about the unthinkable. He walks over to their Eatchen screen and says, “On screen.”

“Something’s Coming.”

The font has doubled in size since their chat in the boudoir.

“Do you see this, Li? This screen is plugged in—my screen upstairs? That wasn’t patched into the 3W—I wasn’t working with the worldwideweb. I was on the funder’s most secure system working alone and writing a report.

“This had no business being on my screen. Sugar, something isn’t just coming...something is here. Not just here, it’s everywhere!”

Aliyah looked at the laserwave oven and voiced it off. She took the chicken platter out of the self-cleaning alcove and started to nibble on the white, steaming meat. She started thinking about the super secret project that her man had decided to discuss with her one night after the throes of passion had been sated.

“Someone went back to Jerusalem, Nicky?” She asked calmly.

“What? You think that someone on the program had the balls to take that chance? You think that apple was so irresistible that someone had to bite?” Nick wiped his forehead with a dry towel and realized he was perspiring uncontrollably. “How can you sit there eating that chicken?”

“Easy. I just pluck,” she closes an index finger and thumb around a white strand of fowl breast and opens her plump lips, “tuck,” shoving the lilting white flesh behind the two rows of perfectly whitened teeth, “and suck.”

Nick turns away and gapes at the screen.

“Something’s Co

"’March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I - and it - had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This cannot exist; it cannot exist.' Dick wrote eight years before his death, Liyah.” Nick continues explaining the offsprings’ revelations of their father’s work.

“Dick thought it was all horse hockey, but he was wrong, Li. He was the first time pilot, sweetie. On March 20^th of that same week he wrote of being lifted ‘from the limitations of the space-time matrix’ and saw the world for the dust that it was. He called it ‘cardboard’ and ‘a fake’ and then he ‘took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing.’”

“You didn’t answer my question, hun. Do you think someone went back to seek out Jesus?”

The Jerusalem Project was the most confidential file that any of the time pilots were aware existed. Only the top three members of the funder’s community knew of its existence. These three, the eight time pilots and Aliyah made twelve human beings that were in the inner circle of this tight ring of revelations.

“Phildickian was a term rarely used to describe current events that had strange twists and turns like much of Dick’s works. He often wrote of inner, outer body and hive mind experiences with strange conclusions to his sci-fi stories. He was like a king amongst the visionary sci-fi court of writing jesters.”

“You think Philip K. Dick spoke to Jesus, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Nicky, that was 100 years ago. You said these visions happened in 1974—you saw them.”

“No man knows when the coming of man shall be. Liyah, that was always the great mystery of the book. That’s what made it work—no one knew when or if Jesus was coming back—it’s what allowed all the cults to grow until we started filming the bogus realities of their origins. That was too much for people and the kingdom of heaven was no longer at hand, game over, play something else.”

“But we live in paradise now—when people saw what we were doing to the earth and changed with the technology of our saviour Witcomb—it all changed—we got to eternity on our own, Nicky, with your help, the time pilots help—we found world peace.”

“It changed, Li, but numbers don’t lie and no man ever found out when the Lord of Book would return—except maybe for Dick. He died in 1982, was born in 1928. Same numbers right? His visions occurred in 1974. Add up the numbers.

“Twelve.”

“Dick was a mirror, duality, circular reasoning kind of schizophrenic freakish writing idiot savante.”

“What’s your point, hun?”

“Add up 2073, Li.”

“omigod, twelve.”

“How many disciples did Jesus have—twelve.”

“But 1928 doesn’t add up to twelve...and neither does 1982, for that matter.”

“That’s the mirror darkly thing—it doesn’t have to add up—it just has to be a completed cycle or cycles. Add 20 and 20 and you get 40. Forty years in the wilderness, forty days in the desert, forty days on mount Sinai—the numbers always work—you just have to work them, sweetie. That’s how both Einsteins did it—they completed the cycles.”

The two turned to face the screen.

Somethin

“Okay, Nicky you got me thinking now, but I’m still not scared—why are you?”

Nicholas Philip Ruckard turns to look out the wall of clear glass overlooking the Pacific Ocean for the last time as a sentient human being—his wife does the same. A few palm tree fronds flutter on the late afternoon breeze and far on the horizon an event swathed with a pinkish glow seems to grow.

“Do you see it, Li?”

“I see it.”

A pair of alabaster love birds—the only pets that Nick and Aliyah ever owned. They were a gift and the pairing flitted in the large clear cage as one—merging in flight—mirroring wings. A line of pink evanescence stretched from north to south rising like a tsunami from the ultramarine sea. It rose steadily seeming to digitize the clear ocean and send it nevermore—evermore—out.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too, Aliyah. Something’s coming. I’m not scared anymore.”

∞

I have written this as a memoire to one of the least lauded sci-fi writers of the twentieth century. Philip K. Dick is the author of many short stories that have become movies in the last 28 years of his non-existence. Total Recall, Blade Runner, Minority Report are but a few of the movies that have been created by Dick’s complicated mind. You can see a more in-depth report of his life at the official website created by the three offspring of Philip K. Dick.