BC Time-Slip 1: Flight

[This is the first section of my novelisation of Philip K. Dick’s visit to Vancouver in 1972 written in the style of the author.]

 “Would you like a cold beverage Mr Dick?” the voice asked.

From the depths of his Luminal slumber Phil Dick adjusted his vision to focus on the figure standing before him. She seemed familiar, as people you’ve never met before do in dreams. Early 20’s, about 5” 4’, dark hair tucked neatly inside a cap that matched her grey uniform.

“Erm….yes please. Bourbon on the rocks.”

“Certainly Mr Dick. Your drink will be with you in a moment” the woman beamed before shimmering out of view.

Where am I he thought? In the distance, beneath snow-capped mountains, he saw a glimmering white city of high-rise apartments hovering over a vast river that flowed into to the sea. To his left, where a forest of pines met the water, the sand gradually transformed itself into great boulders. He could hear the sound of waves gently lapping the shore and the cry of distant seagulls. To his right a crow bobbed about on one of the many logs that lay on the empty beach.

The words ‘DRINK READY’ flashed into his field of vision. He instantly recognised the familiar notification ping of Freegle, the giant tele-computing company that now controlled almost all the virtual entertainment and personalised data services on the planet. Forcing his eyes to the very upper left he clocked the tell-tale company logo that confirmed he was inside one of their Virtual World packages.

His hands moved nervously as they reached for the device that covered his face.

Until recently removing the Freegle vid goggles had been as automatic as turning off the ignition of a car. But over the last few months the Freegle logo had been appearing in his dreams, especially the most terrifying ones. Then, instead of returning him to the predicable certainties of waking life, clicking on the icon delivered him to a deeper level of nightmare running parallel to it.

Taking a deep breath he lifted the goggles slowly and looked around.

He was on a flight. The passengers around him were either asleep, wearing their goggles or both. All the window screens were drawn but here and there shafts of daylight broke through beneath them. Slowly it came back to him.

He was on his way to Vancouver to be guest of honour at a major science fiction convention. The invitation had arrived six weeks ago and could not have come at a better time. Life in California Free State was a living hell. His home in Marin County had become a half-way house for runaway teenagers, local drug users, their dealers and male in-laws, thrown out by their wives. Phil had welcomed them into his home with open arms. The make-shift community misfits loved listening to Phil’s crack-pot theories about life, death and politics and he adored their adulation. They spent their hours, days, weeks high on weed and blitzed on speed while Phil Indulged them with his peerless collection of classical music recordings. Maybe they would fill the void left when his fourth wife Nancy walked out with their daughter two years ago. His sort-of girlfriend Donna, a teenage biker chic who he believed could save the world, baled on him at the last minute and he had boarded the plane despairing and alone. By the time he found his seat the barbs he’d downed in the waiting area had begun to take effect.

Breathing a sigh of deep relief he sunk back into the reassuring solidity of the business class seat the organisers had paid for.

A veteran science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick had developed his craft as the apocalyptic shadows of two world wars jaded the shiny future of the genre’s Golden Age. Since then the technology that promised so much had taken a sinister turn and in the worlds he created through his fictions the people at the bottom of the pile, those manning the machines, felt this reversal first and worst.

He’d begun writing his near-future fictions while working at a record and radio store in Berkeley in the early 50’s. He was happy there. It was a sanctuary where he could dream of being an inter-galactic DJ playing Bach to the stars. He met his second wife Kleo in the store, a political science major and committed left wing militant, who, because her husband was too shy to do so, took one of his stories to a creative writing course she was taking. It told the tale of a dog called Boris who mistook regular garbagemen for inter-planetary aliens stealing his master’s food. When Boris tried to warn him, all the master could hear was Boris’s frantic barking.

Published to his great surprise in a national pulp SF magazine, Phil immediately gave up his day job, became a full-time writer and a decade later had nine published novels under his belt.  One of them, a what-if story in which the allies lost the war and North America was now ruled by Germany and Japan, was awarded first prize by the World Science Fiction Society. His reputation as a counter-cultural icon had grown during in the decade that followed as a new generation of sci-fi readers, more hip to what his novels said about the recent past and fucked-up present than any way out futures, tuned into the religious and philosophical themes he had woven into his novels from the beginning. The reality shifts experienced by his brow-beaten, over-medicated protagonists, unable to distinguish subjective delusion from mass mediated psychopathology and gradually slipping into psychotic wormholes, struck a spookily familiar chord for those born in the era of live television, Cold War paranoia and LSD. Then there was the German thing, the recurring literary allusions to a verboten ancestral heritage now thoroughly melded in the minds of Nixon-era Americans with pure evil and the capacity for normal people to be taken in by it. Of all the new wave science fiction writers Phil Dick had dug deepest into the psychological hard-wiring of the Führer-complex and Father-thing.

He was now in his early 40s, his hair was greying and his belly had begun to bulge from the beers he drank to wash down the handfuls of pills he took when not sleeping for three days at a time. The anxiety disorders that plagued him since childhood had gotten worse, he was unable to drive to the convenience store fearing he would crash the car, couldn’t eat when people were around, and the paranoia he famously cultivated in his novels had spilled over into his reality in ways that freaked out even the freakiest of his freak friends.

His journey to the lower circles had been a gradual one, a descent he could plot through a series of failed marriages. But his ineluctable journey towards what he called the “tomb world” began the day he was born, prematurely and a twin, to his sister Jane.

Unprepared for parenthood, and unaware she was carrying twins, neither his mother Dorothy nor his father Edgar had any idea how to take care of new born babies. Without enough milk to feed them the twins grew sicker with each day of their new life. Had it not been for the random visit to the family home by a Life Insurance salesman, Phil would never have made it to the hospital where, five days from dying, was put on a special formula and survived.

Jane died on the way there.

Dorothy never forgave herself for Jane’s death and never stopped reminding Phil of her remorse. Now an only child, Jane became a constant imaginary presence in his life. It was as if she had not really died but had instead passed into another reality and grown up there as Phil had done in his. And who knew? Perhaps he was the one who had died.

In a world dominated by a strong, highly intelligent and guilt-ridden mother, the young Phil buried himself in books and played with his imaginary female friends. It was a pattern, he learned, from many years of psychotherapy, that would shape all his future relationships. Through the women in his life Phil sought to escape the terrible isolation he felt abandoned to and to be re-united with his vital, cosmic twin. Writing novels served similar ends. In them terminally dysfunctional beta-men trapped in terminal jobs yearned for sexual union with unreal women from higher realms of existence. But like the actual women he tried to build a life with, after writing a novel the world he returned to seemed more spiritually decomposed than the one he had left behind.

“B-U-U-R-B-O-N-O-N-T-H-A-R-O-C-K-S” the machine croaked. To his left an automated drinks trolley had trundled along the isle and stopped by his seat. A slot on the side of trolley flipped open and a tiny can rolled out. He took the can, cracked it and pulled the vid-goggles back over his eyes.

Through the touch pad on the arm rest of his seat he clicked ‘Arial View – Fly’ and felt himself lifted up from the beach and soaring into the sky high above Vancouver. Setting the goggles to ‘Historical View’ he used two finger tips to scroll through a historical time-lapse of city’s growth. Setting the timeline at 08.08.1774 FIRST CONTACT he watched the city grow like frost from a tiny cluster of Native dwellings on the southern shore of Burrard Inlet, through the first European forts established on the banks of the Frazer River and into a lattice of grids spreading to the present US border, a horizontal line that cut the continent cleanly in two. The time-line came to stop at 16.02.1972 VANCOUVER NOW. He marvelled at the speed of the process. How long had it taken Rome to grow? Or London? A thousand years? Maybe in the future entire cities will generate themselves in a matter of days.

Clicking on the ‘Historical Information’, a machine-generated Canadian voice told the story of the city’s development.

“The region now known as the Vancouver Metropolitan Area was first discovered by Russian fur traders and European explorers searching for the elusive Northwest passage in the late 18^th century. The city was named after George Vancouver, the Royal Naval Officer who surveyed the coast for the British Crown in 1792. At that time the region was populated by the native Musequeam, Squamish, Stó꞉lō and Tsleil-Waututh people, who shared the coasts great natural bounty. It is estimated that as many as 60,000 Native people lived in the Lower Frazer Valley the time of First Contact. The current population of the Metropolitan area is approximately 1,100,000 people.

“The first European settlements were trading posts built on the banks of the Frazer River by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Sea otter and beaver pelts bought from the Natives were sold in China in exchange for silk, tea and porcelain destined for European markets. With a view to creating a British settlement in the area, and to defend against territorial claims by the United States, the Hudson’s Bay Company built forts on Vancouver Island and the mainland. But it wasn’t until the discovery of gold in Frazer Canyon in 1858 that the development of what would become the modern wonder of Vancouver began in earnest. From the small sawmill settlements of Gastown and Moodyville it took little more than a century for Vancouver to become the vibrant Metropolitan city we know today.”

He typed in the name of the hotel hosting the convention into ‘Location Search’, clicked ‘Go’ and felt himself descending into a three dimensional simulation of the city and being gently landed onto a sidewalk populated by generic, ghostly emulations of passers-by. Moving the pointer to the façade of the hotel, he clicked on the historical information icon that automatically appeared in view.

“Taking its name from the opulent family home of the Vanderbilt family in North Carolina, the Biltmore Motor Hotel is a contemporary hotel built in Miami Modern style. It is situated in the Mount Pleasant area of Kingsway, a major four lane thoroughfare that extends the King George Freeway from New Westminster, East of the city, straight into the bustling heart of Downtown Vancouver and the vibrant nightlife of Gastown. For travellers who want to enjoy a night of entertainment closer to home, the hotel host its own famous cabaret. Please come in and take a look around”.

Rotating the 360° view to the hotel entrance and clicking on the arrows on the ground, he entered the lobby. “Good morning Mr Dick, We’re looking forward to welcoming you later today”, the simulant concierge beamed. “If you would like to look around just click on the name signs of the room you’d like to visit.” A panel of room names appeared before him. He clicked on Cabaret. The walls of the lobby dissolved and he found himself sitting at a table in a well-lit hall. A four piece, mop-headed rock band were playing Beatle’s songs to a cluster of well-dressed simulants. Their jerky, repetitive movements, ill-defined boundaries and low-quality rendering made Phil feel queasy. Clicking ‘Back’ twice he returned to the reassuring, spectral bustle of Mount Pleasant, raised an invisible can to his lips and followed the signs towards Gastown.

Pausing at the junction with Terminal Avenue where Kingsway turns into Main Street, he admired the high-quality rendering of the grand Pacific Central railway station on his right. It looked over an expanse of water surrounded by wharfs and sawmills upon which red logs floated in regimented rafts. He clicked on the historical time-lapse icon and watched the buildings dissolve into a muddy tidal plane surrounded by giant pine forests. In the distance a plume of smoke suggested a Native settlement.

“Before the age of the automobile, and Vancouver’s development as a popular, international tourist destination, Kingsway was known as the False Creek Trail, the name given to the inlet by British military surveyors mapping the territory for colonisation. It was one of many local routes by Native communities known a “grease trails” after the Eulachon fish oil much prized by them and used in their traditional potlatch celebrations. Before First Contact False Creek was the site of a village known by the local tribes as Sen̓áḵw.’

Phil finished off his drink. It tasted of tin.