By Eko | Source
Both men suspected this world isn’t the real one. They were more worried about what a fake world does to the people inside it, and they found the same way out.
In November 1971, somebody blew open Philip K. Dick’s fireproof filing cabinet, and his first feeling was relief.
It was an 1,100-pound steel cabinet. Whoever came into his house used explosives to get at a science fiction writer’s papers. Dick walked in, saw the wreck, and thought,
We know his work even if we’ve never read him.
Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report all came out of one question he asked until he died: what if this world isn’t the real one?
In 2016 Elon Musk told a conference the odds we’re living in base reality are one in billions, and people treated it like a new idea. Last Thursday, a lawyer from OpenAI and a product director from Meta told the committee that writes the evidence rules for our federal courts that fake audio and video are getting cheap, fast and hard to catch. The courtroom is the one room we built to settle what actually happened, and the experts it called in can’t promise to know anymore.
Whether the world is fake matters less than what a fake world does to the people living in it, and whether anyone is on the other end of the line. Dick figured that out. So did a pipe-smoking Oxford professor who died the same day as JFK and Aldous Huxley, eight years before that cabinet blew open.
The silent planet
C.S. Lewis gave us Narnia. He also wrote sci-fi. In 1938 he published Out of the Silent Planet. A man is kidnapped and flown to Mars, where he learns the other worlds have a name for ours. They call it Thulcandra, the Silent Planet. Every world in the heavens talks with every other world and with the one who made them, except this one. The spirit put in charge of Earth went bent long ago and the line was cut. Nothing has gone in or out since.
36 years later, in February 1974, Dick was home recovering from dental surgery when a delivery woman from the pharmacy brought his pain pills. She wore a gold fish on a chain around her neck. He asked what it was. She said it was a sign the early Christians used.
Soon after a pink beam of light hit him and told him his baby son had a hidden hernia that could kill him. He took the boy in. The doctor found it right where the light said it would be.
Dick spent the rest of his life trying to name what spoke to him, and filled about 8,000 pages doing it. Some nights it was God. Some nights it was the Holy Spirit, a satellite, a future version of himself, or something from the first century leaking through. In 1977 he told a crowd in Metz, France, that something he called the Programmer reaches back, changes a variable and rewrites the timeline around us.
One was a restless California writer, married five times and usually broke. The other was an Oxford don who took long walks with his friends. Lewis imagined the cut wire. Dick swore he heard a voice come down it.
Fake humans
In 1978 Dick wrote a speech with a title only he could have written: How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. Halfway through, he sets the simulations down and looks at his 11-year-old daughter watching TV. He wonders who is teaching her what’s real.
His answer wasn’t aliens. It was the media, governments, big corporations, religious and political groups, people who had never met his daughter and were building a world inside her head. And he saw where it ends.
Fake realities will create fake humans.
Given long enough, we stop feeling it as something done to us. We feel it as ourselves.
Lewis had already written the scene. In That Hideous Strength, from 1945, a scientific institute moves into a quiet English university town promising a better humanity. A young professor named Mark Studdock wants badly to be in its inner circle. One night they ask him to write two newspaper stories about the riot in town. The riot hasn’t happened yet. The institute plans to start it tomorrow. Mark asks how he’s supposed to report something that hasn’t occurred. The important men laugh at him, and before morning he’s written both stories.
Nobody tortures him. He wants to belong, and the laughter of the right people carries him over the line before he notices he’s crossed it.
Lewis called the result men without chests: clever, useful people with nothing in the middle. Dick called them fake humans. The thing that gets forged is us.
And it doesn’t take force. In The Screwtape Letters, a senior devil coaches a junior one on keeping an ordinary man from God, and almost all of the advice is distraction. Keep him from ever seriously meaning to pray. Then the old devil lays out the long plan: “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.” Lewis wrote that in 1942, long before the noise moved into our pockets. The phone built to keep us scrolling. The news built to keep us scared. The feed that decides which few of today’s 1,000 true things we’ll ever hear about.
A rancher doesn’t need the herd to understand anything.
He just needs it busy.
The ape
In The Last Battle, the final Narnia book, a clever ape named Shift finds the skin of a dead lion and talks a gentle, simple donkey named Puzzle into wearing it. He brings Puzzle out at night by firelight and tells the animals Aslan has come back. From then on, every order Shift gives, he gives in Aslan’s name, and the animals hand over everything.
The costume is terrible. Anyone who’d stood in front of the real Aslan would have known in a second. Shift didn’t need a good fake. He needed animals who’d forgotten the real one.
In that same 1978 speech, Dick calls Satan the Ape of God. Evil can’t make anything. It can only copy what God made and pass the copy off as the original. A forged check works because real checks exist. A fake lion works because a real Lion once walked through Narnia and the animals still remember they loved him.
Puzzle wasn’t the villain. The people we love who get fooled every day aren’t either. Nobody gets argued out of a costume. We bring them close enough to the real thing that they can see the stitches.
The child who knew
Near the end of that speech, Dick admits he never figured out what reality is. What he worked out was what makes a person real. It isn’t intelligence or seeing behind the curtain. A real person knows what he shouldn’t do and refuses to do it, even when the refusal costs him and the people he loves.
For that kind of clarity, the man with 8,000 pages on the machinery of heaven went to his kids. “When I want to know what is true, I ask my children.”
His son Christopher, the boy whose hernia the light had found, was four by then. He had a metal lantern shaped like a fish, and one day he announced, “I am a fisherman. I fish for fish.” It was the same sign the delivery woman wore, the one his father had spent four years trying to decode, and the boy was just playing with it.
Dick ends the speech at Disneyland, imagining the day time ends and the mechanical birds and lions and deer come alive. Lewis ends Narnia by walking the children into a country more solid than the one they knew, where their whole life until then turns out to have been only the cover and the title page.
Both men, with every theory in the world, ended on a child who knew the original and couldn’t be fooled by the costume. Jesus said it first. Unless we turn and become like little children, we won’t enter the kingdom at all.
The sign and the sidecar
Most think they’d believe if they got a sign. Dick got one. Woman at the door wearing the oldest Christian symbol there is, then a beam of light, then a voice that saved his son.
He died eight years later still trying to work out who sent it.
Lewis got nothing like that. In September 1931 he walked late into the night with J.R.R. Tolkien, who told him the story of Jesus was a myth like the old myths Lewis loved, except this one really happened.
A few days later Lewis rode to the zoo in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” he wrote, “and when we reached the zoo I did.”
No light, no voice, just a ride to the zoo.
The call and the answer
Dick wrote Radio Free Albemuth in 1976. It didn’t come out until 1985, three years after he died. He put himself in it as a character named Phil, and he put the delivery woman in too, gold fish and all.
A record executive hears a voice at three in the morning, night after night. It saves his son, warns him of a trap before the trap is set, and tells him the lights went out on this world long ago and it has been calling ever since, one person at a time. On an operating table he finally asks who it is.
“I am your father.”
Where are you?
“Above the stars.”
Dick wrote that answer down himself, six years before he died, and went back to searching as if he hadn’t. He died in March 1982. Blade Runner opened that June. He’d seen about 20 minutes of it.
Lewis, in the last year of his life, finished a book of letters to an imaginary friend named Malcolm, chiefly on prayer. In it he gives the prayer he says before all his other prayers. “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.”
Dick wrote the call: a Father above the stars reaching one person at a time through the static. Lewis wrote the reply: a real man asking to reach the real Father, with no costume on either end. Dick had the answer and couldn’t rest in it. Lewis had no sign at all and rested.
The garden
Jesus’ friends watched him heal the sick and raise the dead, and they never asked him to teach them how. One day they found him praying. When he finished, one of them said, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
The first word of his answer was Father. They had watched him slip away from the crowds before dawn and come back different, and they had figured out that whatever he did out there was the source of everything else.
I’ve spent most of this year writing the last book of the Nazarene saga. It’s called Third Day, and it covers the final week of Jesus’ life and what came after. This is how I wrote the night before he died.
He took three of his friends up the hill after supper, asked them to stay close, then went a little farther, knelt in the grass and put his forehead to the ground. “Father. The hour has come. I do not shrink from it.” He had already done everything a man could do. He had turned down a crown, a guarded road, a hidden room, a defended camp and a sword raised in his name, and now his two hands lay open in the grass.
His friends fell asleep.
He woke them and went back, and the second time he prayed lower.
“All things are possible with you. It is bitter. I would drink it if it is your will.”
His voice broke on the last word. He didn’t pretend it wasn’t bitter. He just stopped making his own plan the condition. Then he got up. Below the grove, torchlight was coming into the trees, and he walked to the edge of the clearing and faced down the slope toward it.
He didn’t change the machinery coming for him, and he didn’t let it decide who he would be. He didn’t pray his way out of the morning.
He prayed his way into it.
Near the end of the book, after it’s all over, Jesus stands in the doorway of his family’s house one last time. His brother James, who never believed in him while he was alive, asks what work he means.
“The work in front of you,” Jesus says, and then the doorway is empty.
Nobody at the table sits down. James starts. “Our Father.” His sister joins on the next line, then his brother, then their mother, and James finishes it alone.
The real thing
The fakes will only get better.
The courtroom will keep losing its grip on what happened. Machine will make pictures of someone feeding a hungry child, and the picture won’t feed the child. It will copy a father’s voice, and the voice won’t raise a son.
We were never going to find our way home by catching every fake. The animals in Narnia didn’t need a better lion detector. They needed to remember the Lion. A child doesn’t verify his father’s voice. He knows it.
We can’t settle whether this world is real by studying the machinery, and we don’t have to. We can settle whether we are, whether we’re the person who refuses the wrong thing whatever it costs. We can settle who we’re talking to, the way Lewis did every time he prayed, the way James did at that table.
Dick stood in the wreck of his house in 1971 and felt relieved, because it meant someone was there. He spent the rest of his life trying to learn who. He wrote the answer down himself: your Father, above the stars.
The planet isn’t as silent as it looks. He hasn’t stopped calling. The noise is loud because it’s meant to be, and every pull of it needs us to go along.
We can stop going along. We can pick up the line.
♥ EKO