I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Dick, Philip K. "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (1980). We Can Remember It for You Wholesale: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick. Volume 5. London: Millennium/Gollancz, 2000: 359-73. Cited in Jorge Martins Rosa's SF, Philip K. Dick, and the Space Age, upon whom we largely depend. "The short story was first published in Playboy in December 1980, under the title 'Frozen Journey."

Short story in which a "spaceship computer repeatedly feeds the astronaut [...]," Victor Kemmings, "with a fake reality, so that his mind does not deteriorate from lack of sensorial data during a ten-year journey in cryonic suspension. However, his buried memories keep interfering, leading to a loop" (Rosa, p. 59). Rosa quotes the story (Rosa, pp. 59-60): Oh, dear, the ship said to itself. And I've got almost ten years of this lying ahead of me. He is hopelessly contaminating his experiences with childhood guilt [...]. And ten years from now it will take a lot to save — or rather restore — his sanity; it will take something drastic, something myself [sic] cannot do alone. (369) [Ellipsis mark in Rosa's text.] Rosa concludes, "But the apparently happy ending [...] may turn out to be nothing more than another level of fake and artificial reality" (60). In the Wikipedia "stub" for the story, "To maintain his sanity, the A.I. replays Kemmings's memories to him. But when this goes awry, the ship's A.I. asks Kemmings what he wants most -- and the answer is that Kemming wants the trip to be over and to arrive at his new home. The A.I. constructs such a scenario for Kemming and plays it to him over and over for the next ten years. When the ship finally arrives at its destination, Kemming cannot accept reality and believes his arrival to be yet another construction."

In the quotation from the computer, note the folksiness of "Oh, dear," the self-consciousness — and full artificial intelligence/machine intelligence implicit in the ship's AI computer talking to itself — and the concern with lying: cf. HAL 9000 in A. C. Clarke (and Stanley Kubrick's) novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Note more generally the Dickian concern that what we perceive as reality may be illusion, which we might see as a cybernetic VR form of Maya.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 29Jan19