Philip K. Dick Super Pack

They accepted anything that came along. There was no longer any normal, any natural course of things, moral or physical, for them to expect. Custom, habit, all the determining forces of learning were gone; only brute experience remained.

It’s strange, machines so much like people that you can be fooled. Almost alive. I wonder where it’ll end.”

“They’re doing what you Yanks designed them to do,” Tasso said. “You designed them to hunt out life and destroy. Human life. Wherever they find it.”

a slag heap with dark weeds growing from the ashes and bones

the Pipers are inside them, their own unconscious voices calling to them to give up their responsibilities. They’ve got to be made to realize that there are no Pipers, at least, not outside themselves. The woods are harmless and the natives have nothing to teach anyone. They’re primitive savages, without even a written language. We’re seeing a psychological projection by a whole Garrison of men who want to lay down their work and take it easy for a while.

Harris, this garrison is one vast machine. The men are parts, and each has his job, the Maintenance Crew, the Biologists, the Office Crew, the Managerial Staff

“If everyone felt the way I do they wouldn’t be going into outer space.”

“But they have to. They have to trade, they have to get minerals and products and new plants.”

“Why?”

“To keep society going.”

“Why?”

“Well—” Harris gestured. “People couldn’t live without society.”

He has no verbal knowledge about things, no semantic references. He deals with the things themselves. Directly.

The machines only do figuring for us in a few minutes that eventually we could do for our own selves. They’re our servants, tools. Not some sort of gods in a temple which we go and pray to. Not oracles who can see into the future for us. They don’t see into the future. They only make statistical predictions—not prophecies. There’s a big difference there, but Reinhart doesn’t understand it

Too slow for you, Commissioner? Laws, debates, council meetings, discussions…. Saves a lot of time if one man has all the power. One man to tell people what to do, think for them, lead them around.

A man who can’t be predicted. It goes against science. We’ve been making statistical reports on society for two centuries. We have immense files of data. The machines are able to predict what each person and group will do at a given time, in a given situation. But this man is beyond all prediction. He’s a variable. It’s contrary to science