Faith of our Fathers - Phillip K Dicks Lost Terrifying Cosmic Horror

Transcript

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I know who you are, Tong Chen thought to himself. You, the supreme head of the world-wide party structure. You who destroy whatever living object you touch. I see that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to eat them. I see you astride the plain which to you is earth. Plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear anytime, devour anything. You engineer life, then guzzle it, and you enjoy that, he thought. You are God, hi guys, Quinn here. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like button. It's the best way to get the YouTube algorithm to take notice of my YouTube channel. Thanks so much, guys. Philip K. Dick is an extremely influential science fiction author. I would say that he's one of the most influential authors to come out of the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. He's most famous to the general public for being the author who wrote the source material for the Blade Runner movie, Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? But quite frankly, the book is much different and much weirder compared to the movie. Now, I've already done a full video on Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, but today we're going to be focusing on a much less known story by Philip K. Dick, one that I think has silently influenced lots of works of science fiction. There are threads of influence in movies like The Matrix and They Live, and in other sci-fi that deals with the idea of hidden systems of control, the idea of manufactured reality, and the mind-breaking idea that the world you experience is not just false, but is actively lying to you. This story appeared in a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison called Dangerous Visions. It included 33 stories by various authors, one of which was Faith of Our Fathers by Philip K. Dick. This was in 1967, during the New Wave of Sci-Fi, which we've delved into a few times on this channel. In short, it was a movement within the science fiction genre that originated in Britain. Authors during the New Wave started to explore more transgressive topics within the genre. They wanted to push the genre's boundaries. It's from The New Wave that we get books like Dune, books like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, The Man in the High Castle, Nova by Samuel R. Delaney. Philip K. Dick's short story, Faith of Our Fathers, follows a man named Tong Chin, who works for the government in the city of Hanoi. He works specifically for the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts. This story exists in a timeline where there occurred a great war known as the Colossal Final War of National Liberation. It was the People's Democratic United Front vs. Imperialist. Apparently, the West had lost this war. Eight billion people now lived under the rule of the absolute benefactor of the people, who addressed the populace every evening through television, which was mandatory to watch. At the start of the story, Qian is approached by a peddler of supposed cures for maladies, supposed herbal remedies. At first, Qian doesn't care and signals for a hover car taxi. The peddler says that he was in the war. He says it's against the law not to buy from peddler veterans, that Qien would be fined if he did not buy something. At first, Qian attempts to buy something random and useless to him, but the pedlar insists on something else. He asks Qian if he watches TV. Qian says, of course he does, most evenings. The pedlar gives him a grey packet for $60 trade dollars, guaranteed to rest fatigued eyes by the countenance of meaningless official monologues. Qin is confused and slightly annoyed by the situation, but he moves on with his day. He enters the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts and goes to his office to begin his workday. A white man waited in his office along with Qian's superior Tao Pin. They spoke to each other in Cantonese. The white man's name was Darius Pethel. He was supposed to become a new headmaster at a cultural establishment of didactic character, essentially a school of propaganda, open somewhere in California. The absolute benefactor of the people had apparently met with Mr. Pethel and trusted him. Now this school is meant to appear to teach run-of-the-mill Taoist philosophies, but it will actually maintain a channel for them to communicate with the liberal and intellectual youth segment of the Western United States. There were apparently still some of them there, 10,000 or more from San Diego to Sacramento. Supposedly the school was going to accept 2,000 students, and attendance would be mandatory for those that were picked. Qian is meant to determine who among the 2,000 is responding to the programming and who is not. Pethel says that after having lost a war, the American youth lies. The test papers will resemble genuineness. They tell Qien he will be made vice-chancellor of the ministry if he is successful, or that is the promise at least. He would also be bestowed the Kisterigian medal by the benefactor himself. Chien resents this. He knows that the CPUSA is in trouble. It's not managing to do its job, so it's been dropped onto his lap. They give him two papers from students to examine as a test to see if he is qualified. One of them is titled Doctrines of the Absolute Benefactor, anticipated in the poetry of Baha Adin Zurhar of 13th Century Arabia. Once he will miss, twice he will miss. He only chooses one of many hours, for him, nor deep nor hill, but all one level plain. He hunts for flowers. At home he reads the other essay. This one also has a poem by a man named John Dryden. So in the last dreadful hour, this crumbling pageant shall devour. The trumpet shall be heard on high, the dead shall live, the living die, and music shall untune the sky. To me, this sounds similar to certain lines in the Book of Revelation. Chin believes that the student is trying to say that poet John Dryden was hinting at the fall of capitalism. Chin finds this ridiculous. Chin turns on the television. They are about to be addressed by the leader, the absolute benefactor of the people. The absolute benefactor of the people lived in Peking, where he had lived for the last 90 or 100 years. He was apparently 120 years old. Qian rose to his feet as was mandatory. Each TV came with a monitoring device. On the TV appears the online features of the leader, ruler of far too many, Qian thought. The benefactor on TV mentions Qian by name and his difficult task ahead. He honors him. Qian believes it's possible that the broadcast was localized, that only his city was seeing this, or even only him. He thought then of the pedlar's packet, so he reads the writing on it. Failing as a party member and human? Afraid of becoming obsolete and discarded on the ash heap of history by The Packet contained some kind of aromatic snuff. According to it, it cured everything from being late to work to falling in love with a woman of dubious political background. Before he takes it, however, a knock at the door. The building warden comes in. He has received a call from the television authority. Qian was failing to watch the screen. He is reprimanded and ordered to replay the speech. Qian wishes he could be free of the noise of mandatory speeches. But there was no order preventing him from taking the snuff. So he snorted it and went back to watching the screen. The face of the benefactor disappeared. The sound ceased. He faced an empty vacuum. He heard a hiss sound from the speaker. He inhales the rest of the powder. He feels as though the powder is going directly to his brain. The screen remains blank until an image forms again. Not the leader. Not a human figure at all. A dead mechanical construct made of solid state circuits, of swiveling pseudopodia lenses, and a squawk box. What is this? Reality? Hallucination? He thought. Afraid he calls the police, wishing to report a pusher of hallucinogenic drugs. When he goes back to his chair, the apparition is still there. Ironically, he had hoped the drug would relieve him of the burden of the leader's speeches, but this was far worse to him. A metal and plastic monstrosity yammering away. He found it terrifying. It eventually became normal again as the drug wore off. Eventually the cops get there. He shows them the snuff. The presence of the police was comforting to him, but there was still some unexplainable reluctance when he tells them where he got the snuff, almost as if something inside him didn't want to tell them. They say that they will have it analyzed, as he likely knows some of the old wartime psychedelics were fatal. This could be one of them. But the lab report, which comes back more swiftly than expected, said otherwise. In fact, the results were quite ominous. It was not a hallucinogen. It was, in fact, an anti-hallucinogenic. A phenothiazine. Soon after this, someone rings the doorbell, a woman named Tanya Lee. She had been monitoring his video phone somehow. She asked if they took the rest of the snuff, which is hard to get these days. She asked him to tell her what he saw. According to her, everyone sees something different, and they don't understand why. But they know that there were in total twelve different forms, not an infinite amount. The aquatic horror shape, called the gulper, the thing with the slime and teeth, the extraterrestrial life form. He saw the machine, which was called the clinker. There is also the bird, the climbing tube, the crusher, which was some kind of giant storm, and others. Tanya is apparently a part of an organization that wants to know what the absolute benefactor, their leader, really is. The leader is not the leader. He is something else, but we can't tell what. Tanya says that her organization has been the ones distributing the drug called stellazine. They thought that he was a good choice. She asks him if they were having him poll read, study something to see if it fits established party worldview. She says that there is no school in California. The essays that they have given him are forged papers designed to test him, to see if he can tell the difference between orthodox work and heretical work. If he chooses wrong, his career stops dead. Her organization had been monitoring Dao Penn's office. And they know that Mr. Pethel is actually the higher sequel inspector, Judd Crane. She herself claims to be a minor clerk at the ministry. Members of her organization apparently held positions wherever they could. She also tells him that the water is saturated with hallucinogens, specifically one called Detrox III. She gives him the information that the essay with the Arabic poem was apparently the orthodox one. She tells him that he should tell them that. He wonders what she wants with him. He asks if she is anti-party. She says no. He says it is a dichotomy. However, she replies that all she and her organization want to know is who slash what is leading them. They need him because they want someone high enough on their side that can meet the leader. She says that they have hope that if he passes the test, he will be invited to one of the leader's stag parties, which were never reported in the papers. If he could go there under the influence of the drug, see it face to face as it actually is, they could know the truth. The next morning, at the ministry building, he tells Dao Pin and Mr. Darius Pathel that the Arabic poem is the Orthodox one, as Tanya had told him. They say that this is correct, and that the leader already wants to see him at a dinner party. They give him a card of admission. He will be flown in. According to Pethel, the benefactor is a white man named Thomas Fletcher. It is not a secret, apparently, that he is white, but it is not really known. Apparently, the TV image is refined and edited for ideological purposes. So everyone agrees, Tanya's group and the ministry members, what we see on television is not real. But what is the level of unreality? Pethel says that it will be possible when he sees his greatness in person that he might be disappointed. He says that they have been trained to see him as more than a man. But in reality, he is like them. Chien wonders if he is being led into one trap after another. He wonders if the girl Tanya was an agent of Sekpol, trying to trick him. The next few days he avoids the pedlar, until Thursday when the pedlar corners him. Qian says he doesn't want any more of the drug, but the pedlar mentions that Qian is going to the stag dinner. He begs him to take the medicine so that he can see what it is. He says that their biggest fear is that it may be non-Terran, something not from this world. He tells him also not to use the amphetamines that will be offered to him at the party. Qian tries to ignore him, but a letter from Tanya Li is slipped into the cab nonetheless. It has the drug inside. In this moment, he decides that he will take the drug and find out what it is, even though he knows that curiosity is terminal career-wise. At the stag party, there are topless women, many successful rich people. A random man points out to Chien that one of the girls was actually a boy in drag. At some point, the benefactor, his greatness, finally appears. And this is one of the most unnerving moments in the entire story. What crossed the room toward the table in the center was not a man. And it was not, Jian realized, a mechanical construct either. It was not what he had seen on TV. That evidently was simply a device for speechmaking. Mussolini had once used an artificial arm to salute long and tedious processions. God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee had called the aquatic horror shape? It had no shape, nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense, not there at all. When he managed to look directly at it, the shape vanished. He saw through it, saw the people on the far side, but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its boundaries. It was terrible. It blasted him with its awfulness. As it moved, it drained the life from each person in turn. It ate the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate more with an endless appetite. It hated. He felt its hate. It loathed. He felt its loathing for everyone present. In fact, he shared its loathing. All at once, he and everyone else in the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen slug carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the time coming directly toward him. Or was that an illusion? If this is a hallucination, Chen thought, it is the worst I have ever had. If it is not, then it is evil reality. It is an evil thing that kills and injures. He saw the trail of stepped-on mashed men and women, remnants behind it. He saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies. He heard them attempting speech. I see you, astride the plain which to you is earth, plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear anytime, devour anything, you engineer life, and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that. He thought, You are God. The entity, the supreme leader of the party, is God, the creator of all things, the shaper of fate, the bringer of life and death. But the most horrifying part of the story to me is the part when the benefactor speaks to him. It knows him. It knows his mind, his thoughts, it speaks to him from inside his own head. Mr. Chin, the voice said, but it came from inside his head, not from the mouthless spirit that fashioned itself directly before him. It is good to meet you again. You know nothing. Go away. I have no interest in you. Why should I care about slime? Slime, I am mired in it. I must excrete it, and I choose to. I could break you. I can break even myself. Sharp stones are under me. I spread sharp-pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding places, the deep places boil like a pot. To me the sea is like a pot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined to everything. You are me. I am you. It makes no difference. Just as it makes no difference whether the creature with the ignited breast is a girl or boy. You could learn to enjoy either. It laughed. He could not believe it was speaking to him. He could not imagine. It was too terrible that it had picked him out. I have picked everybody out, it said. Not one is too small. Each falls and dies. I am there to watch. I don't need to do anything but watch. It is automatic. It was arranged that way. And then it ceased talking to him. It disjoined itself, but he still saw it. He felt its manifold presence. It was a globe which hung in the room with fifty thousand eyes, with a million eyes, billions, an eye for each living thing, as it waited for each thing to fall, and then stepped on the living thing as it lay in a broken state. Because of this, it had created the things. And he knew, he understood. What had seemed in the Arabic poem to be death was not death, but God. Or rather, God was death. It was one force, one hunter, one cannibal thing, and it missed again and again, but having all eternity it could afford to miss. Both poems, he realized, the Dryden 12. The crumbling, that is our world, and you are doing it, warping it to come out that way, bending us. Shein tried to leave, but it followed, or it had always been there. He makes a dive for the railing, jumping into the river below to his death, but it stops him with what begins to look to him like a human hand. It tells him to wait, that he will die in time when it chooses. He asks if it founded the party. It says it founded everything. The anti-party and the party. All things. It says that it wants for Chin to see it as it really is and trust it. It tells him to lie and tell Tanya that he saw an overworked, overweight elderly man who drinks too much and likes to pinch the rear ends of girls. But it is what the creature says and implies next that is possibly the most terrifying moment in the story. Its nature is what it is. Good and evil are the same, but it also implies the existence of others. Like it perhaps, but worse. As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you, it said. I will deprive you. Item by item, everything you possess or want. And then, when you are crushed to death, I will unfold a mystery. What is the mystery? The dead shall live, the living shall die. I will kill what lives, I save what has died. I will tell you this. There are worse things than I. But you won't meet them, because by then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the dining room. Prepare for dinner. Don't question what I'm doing. I did it long before there was a Tung Jun, and I will do it long after. This is classic cosmic horror. The unseen, the implied is the most terrifying thing of all. What could be beyond this entity? This creature to which we are no more than playthings, toys, for its amusement. It might suggest a pantheon of terrors, perhaps each worse than the last. The entity tells him not to question what it is doing, to go back to dinner, but Chien thinks to himself that he would dedicate his life to making sure it dies, it suffers. He hits it as hard as he can, which only causes him to feel great pain in his own head. He passes out, and when he wakes, he is told that he had apparently made a scene of himself. His career is ruined. He thinks to himself, our leader, whom we follow, is the one true God, and the enemy who we fight and have fought is God too. They are all God. There is no getting away from it. Deep down he knows that whatever this entity is, this entity that created and is itself the world, cannot be escaped, cannot be defeated. It is always present, always watching with its billions of eyes, an incarnation of pure Lovecraftian terror. Later at his condo, a knock at the door. It is Tanya. She asks about it, and at first he says that she should go as far from here as possible, but he remembers that there is nowhere far enough. It is everywhere. It is everything. He says that they cannot win. She asks if it is non-terrestrial. He says yes. She asks if it is hostile. He says that it is both hostile and non-hostile. Qian asks her if she believes in God, and he asks if it has ever occurred to her that good and evil are names for the same thing, that God could be both. Later he sees a mark on his shoulder. Stigma that would not go away, the mark where God had touched him. The mark bled and would not stop. He thought he may have only hours left to live. The short story basically ends with Qien accepting that there is nothing he or anyone can do to fight against this entity. It is the system, it rules over all, and is the enemy that it itself fights against. His fate is not his own, it belongs to it. No lie, this is one of the freakiest stories ever. There's something about it, it's not just unnerving, there's something about this story that is resonant in a way that rings true. And I don't know what it is. I mean, there's probably no unspeakable entity that governs the world, but unstoppable systems do seem to exist. Systems that we are both a part of and trapped within. Systems of power and control beyond our grasp and understanding as individuals. That's really what the benefactor represents. The never-ending, undefeatable force of control, ideology, and structure. Power that no single person can confront because it isn't a person at all. It's bureaucracy turned metaphysical, an authority without a face. It is a belief system so embedded that resistance itself becomes a part of the machinery. Shian doesn't lose because he's weak. Qian loses because this was a fight that was never winnable on human terms. Thanks so much for listening, guys. Make sure you like and subscribe for more sci-fi literature videos!