A Scanner Darkly

It was inscribed in their neural tissue. Or what remained of it. Nothing could halt it or turn it back now.

And, he had begun to believe, for Bob Arctor most of all. It was his intuition, just begi

And also, his superiors at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office had decided to focus on Bob Arctor; they no doubt had reasons which he knew nothing about. Perhaps these facts confirmed one another: their growing interest in Arctor—after all, it had cost the department a bundle to install the holo-sca

As the taxi drove along, he reflected that he would have to watch awhile to come across anything, more than likely; it would not disclose itself to the monitors in a day. He would have to be patient; he would have to resign himself to a longterm scrutiny and to put himself in a space where he was willing to wait.

Once he saw something on the holo-sca

I wonder what Barris knows that we don’t know, he wondered. Maybe we should haul him in and ask him. But—better to obtain material developed independently from Barris; otherwise it would be a duplication of what Barris, whoever he was or represented, had.

And then he thought, What the hell am I talking about? I must be nuts. I know Bob Arctor; he’s a good person. He’s up to nothing. At least nothing unsavory. In fact, he thought, he works for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, covertly. Which is probably …

… why Barris is after him.

But, he thought, that wouldn’t explain why the Orange County Sheriff’s office is after him—especially to the extent of installing all those holos and assigning a full-time agent to watch and report on him. That wouldn’t account for that.

It does not compute, he thought. More, a lot more, is going down in that house, that run-down rubble-filled house with its weed-patch backyard and catbox that never gets emptied and animals walking on the kitchen table and garbage spilling over that no one ever takes out.

What a waste, he thought, of a truly good house. So much could be done with it. A family, children, and a woman, could live there. It was designed for that: three bedrooms. Such a waste; such a fucking waste! They ought to take it away from him, he thought; enter the situation and foreclose. Maybe they will. And put it to better use; that house yearns for that. That house has seen so much better days, long ago. Those days could return. If another kind of person had it and kept it up.

The yard especially, he thought, as the cab pulled into the newspaper-splattered driveway.

He paid the driver, got out his door key, and entered the house.

Immediately he felt something watching: the holo-sca

Like the scrawls on the wall when you’re peeing in a public urinal, he thought. SMILE! YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA! I am, he thought, as soon as I enter this house. It’s eerie. He did not like it. He felt self-conscious; the sensation had grown since the first day, when they’d arrived home—the “dog-shit day,” as he thought of it, couldn’t keep from thinking of it. Each day the experience of the sca

“Nobody home, I guess,” he stated aloud as usual, and was aware that the sca

And for this shit there are no take-two’s.

What you get instead is wipeout. I mean, what I get. Not the people behind the sca

What I ought to do, he thought, to get out of this, is sell the house; it’s run down anyway. But … I love this house. No way!

It’s my house.

Nobody can drive me out.

For whatever reasons they would or do want to.

Assuming there’s a “they” at all.

Which may just be my imagination, the “they” watching me. Paranoia. Or rather the “it.” The depersonalized it.

Whatever it is that’s watching, it is not a human.

Not by my standards, anyhow. Not what I’d recognize.

As silly as this is, he thought, it’s frightening. Something is being done to me and by a mere thing, here in my own house. Before my very eyes.

Within something’s very eyes; within the sight of some thing. Which, unlike little dark-eyed Do

From the living-room bookcase he took down a volume at random; it turned out to be, he discovered, The Picture Book of Sexual Love. Opening at random, he perceived a page—which showed a man nibbling happily at a chick’s right tit, and the chick sighing—and said aloud, as if reading to himself from the book, as if quoting from some famous old-time double-dome philosopher, which he was not:

“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost …

… perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.”

Nodding, as if moved by the wisdom of the nonexisting written words on that page, he closed the large redbound, gold-stamped Picture Book of Sexual Love and restored it to the shelf. I hope the sca