Ubik

Imagine a future where some people can read minds or see the future, so companies hire folks like Joe Chip to block those powers with special gadgets. Joe's boss, Runciter, dies in a big explosion on the Moon, but keeps talking to everyone from a freezer where dead people stay half-alive and dream. Suddenly, the world goes crazy—fancy 1990s stuff turns into old junk from the 1930s, people start getting younger but rotting away, unless they spray Ubik, a magic canned spray from funny TV ads that fixes everything for a bit. It's a super spooky adventure figuring out who's really dead, fighting invisible monsters eating dreams, and wondering if reality is just one big trick that could vanish any second.

In Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel 'Ubik,' set in a 1992 where telepaths and precogs are countered by anti-psi firms, Joe Chip, a technician at Runciter Associates, accompanies boss Glen Runciter to Luna to shield a client from psychic espionage by the rival Stanton firm. An explosion seemingly kills Runciter, plunging the survivors into a nightmarish half-life—a cryogenic moratorium where consciousness persists post-death. From there, Runciter's messages appear scrawled on walls and matchbooks, warning of devouring psionic entities like Jory, while reality regresses: modern tech devolves to 1930s relics, people age backward into infancy, and organic decay accelerates unless halted by Ubik, a mysterious aerosol spray hyped in omnipresent, era-shifting advertisements. As Joe grapples with paranoia, betrayal—especially from precognitive Pat Conley—and ontological vertigo, Ubik emerges as both savior and enigma, its verses proclaiming cosmic primacy. The narrative culminates in a hallucinatory standoff revealing blurred boundaries between life, death, and simulated afterlives, with Dick masterfully weaving corporate satire, entropy, and unreliable perception into a labyrinthine puzzle that questions the stability of existence itself.