Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams
Episode 8 Autofac
Written by Travis Beacham
Directed by Peter Horton
Starring Juno Temple, Janelle Monae, David Lyons, Nick Eversman
Plot: Following the end of civilisation, the survivors attempt to access an automated system that could hold the key to their salvation.
The Short Story: Autofac opens with one of Philip K. Dick’s efficient pen portraits of a trio of men that, although supposedly existing in the future post-apocalyptic world, couldn’t be more 1950s if they tried. This trio are trying to get the best of an automatic delivery system part of ‘a planet wide network of automatic factories … smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict.’ Mankind’s machines no longer serve their purpose now that humanity has been reduced following an all-out war, yet the machines carry on as if nothing has changed—can humanity overcome not the dominance of the machines (Autofac isn’t Terminator) but their stubborn resistance to changing their set programming.
In a desperate attempt to open communication with the automated systems, Perine, Morrison, and visitor O’Neill waylay an automated delivery truck. When destroying its mixed drop-off of equipment and consumables simply results in a second, identical load being deposited, O’Neill tries a different tack. Pretending the supplied milk is off, he provokes the machine into querying the nature of the defect. The men respond with a nonsense answer: the goods are ‘pizzled’. This gambit garners the promise of a visit from a ‘factory representative’ that will gather ‘data’ on the product deficiency. They have made contact and are one step closer to their ultimate aim of persuading the automated factory to shut down.
The ability to contact and control the factories has been lost as a result of the war. Now that it is over, it is imperative to stop the factories from needlessly consuming resources that could be better deployed, but they can’t be stopped. People like O’Neill have proven there are not infallible, just extremely resistant to any change forced from outside. In today’s terms, it is as if an out-of-control Amazon, Google, or Apple was determined to eat everything up and ignored customers or consumers—so, exactly like today, actually…
The factory representative, when it arrives, turns out to be a proto-humanoid robot, an android. O’Neill engages the machine in debate, in an attempt (to coin a phrase) to ‘take back control’ of the situation mankind has found itself in. The machine is, of course, impervious to persuasion: ‘The machine was leaving: it’s one-track mind had completely triumphed.’ Enraged, the men attempt to physically destroy the machine, but O’Neill knows that such an approach will only cause the network to reassess and improve its defences.
The rapacious autofac system (short for ‘automatic factories’) is stripping the planet of minerals and resources in a bid to create products for which there is no longer any call or need. Humanity appears unable to stop the system. O’Neill and company finally hit upon the idea of going into competition against the machines. By identifying an autofac suffering from a particular shortage, they hope they could mine or otherwise obtain the required mineral—in this case tungsten—themselves, and thereby attract the autofac’s attention.
They succeed in sparking a conflict between rival autofacs over their heap of salvaged tungsten. As the battle intensifies, the autofacs repurpose their ‘factory representative’ androids as armed Battle Droids, ready to go to war over required minerals. As the war of the machines intensifies, the autofacs tool up for total war, redistributing assets from production of consumer consumables to an austerity wartime economy.
A year later and the aim of isolation from the autofac network has been achieved, but at a great cost (is it stretching a point to make this a Brexit metaphor, something Dick could never have foreseen?) As the machine war reaches its conclusion of mutually assured destruction, the humans explore the remains of a nearby destroyed autofac hoping to capture control of the systems to cater to their own survival needs.
As they explore they lament the total destruction of the autofac; perhaps they’ll have to fend for themselves without any salvaged equipment or reconstituted autofacs under human control. Perhaps provoking the war between the autofacs hadn’t been that bright an idea. As O’Neill laments, amid the rubble, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
But there is a spark of life, deep beneath the melted wreck of the huge autofac. The factory is not dead after all. It lives. It survives. And it will go on. The men discover the rebuilt factory is producing ‘pellets’ that are being launched outwards. These contain nanobot replicators, intelligent mini-autofacs capable of building full size autofacs. The pellets are being distributed all over the world—the machines are returning. Not only that, but some may have achieved orbit. The autofacs are ready to move beyond Earth, out into the cosmos…
Autofac is, of course, a rather crude satire on the growing consumer culture of the 1950s, the period when Dick wrote the story. The machine’s insistence on the endless ‘manufacture of consumable commodities’ was a projection of a future based upon the reality that Dick witnessed around him (but, being an under-paid pulp writer, could only participate in to a limited degree). Written in late-1954, Autofac was published in the November 1955 edition of Galaxy magazine.
Dick is also engaging with one of his thematic stand-bys—the dangers of automation that escapes human control. The autofacs are the ultimate expression of this theme, a self-maintaining, self-replicating artificial intelligence network that has outgrown its original purpose and refuses human control. Whether it is artificial intelligence, robots (‘computer says “No”!’), or human bureaucracies, systems that follow the rules and refuse any opportunity to rethink or reassess come under Dick’s criticism. There’s also a criticism of the stupidity of mankind in not only creating such an unstoppable network itself but also in attempting to destroy it with no plan for what might replace it. In ‘taking back control’ the humans are ultimately left with nothing (there’s that Brexit thing again!).
A simpler, more self-sufficient future is suggested by the ‘ruins squatters’, an apparently more ‘primitive’ strain of Total Global Conflict survivors seemingly content with what little they’ve got who are not engaged in trying to take over the autofac system to reinstate the status quo. Is Dick suggesting some kind of ‘simple life’ is an answer to many of humankind’s growing problems, not least of them being the rampant consumerism that was beginning in the 1950s and now is even more out of control and threatening the planet’s resources (just read a George Monbiot column in The Guardian for footnoted analysis of the latest 21st century bad news on this front).
Writing in 1976, Dick said of Autofac: ‘Tom Disch said of this story that it was one of the earliest ecology warnings in SF. What I had in mind in writing it, however, was the thought that if factories became fully automated, they might begin to show the instinct for survival which organic living entities have… and perhaps develop similar solutions.’
There is also a suggestion of stagnation: the autofacs have heretofore been incapable of learning or changing. In providing everything humankind needed (prior to the war), was innovation and progress stalled? Did this cause the conflict? Dick doesn’t say, but the suggestion is there. In emerging out of it’s own Total Global Conflict, perhaps the autofacs will learn and change. In the chilling final notes of the story, they begin to export themselves off-world and into the wider universe. Are they a threat, or merely the machine continuation of life on Earth?
The Television Episode: Now this is more like it—an episode of Electric Dreams that actually stays true to the central conceit of the Philip K. Dick story it is adapting, while also expanding it and modernising it in a respectful, yet imaginative and compatible way. Hurrah for screenwriter Travis Beacham, the only one so far in the first eight episodes of the series to have hit exactly the right balance.
The characters may be different (with their attitudes updated), but the situation is almost straight from Dick’s short story—after a destructive final war, mankind is in receipt of consumer goods deliveries (dropped from drones, rather than brought by trucks—a neat updating, given some of Amazon’s more outlandish plans) from the out-of-control autofacs that are stripping the resources of Earth to create goods no one needs. In an attempt to get the autofac’s attention, Juno Temple’s computer genius Emily Zabriskie hacks the system and makes a request to meet a service representative.
This brings Janelle Monae’s humanoid robot to meet with the humans. This is perfect casting, a role completely in keeping with Monae’s musical and filmic persona. The arrival of Monae’s android is straight out of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind playbook, as her passenger-carrying drone descends from the night sky, a hatch opens, and her humanoid yet strangely inhuman figure is seen to walk down the ramp. It would almost have been alright if she’d said ‘Take me to your leader’.
When group leader Conrad Morrison (David Lyons) meets with her, it is clear that the humans are not going to be able to persuade the autofac system to change its ways. Instead, it is down to Emily to attempt to reprogramme Monae’s Alice (modelled after the original human head of PR for the autofac system) to use her in an audacious plan to infiltrate and destroy the autofac from the inside.
Gone from the short story is the idea of provoking a war between rival autofacs, as is the discovery of robots building new autofacs within the ruins of and old, and their ultimate launch into space. Instead, Beacham offers a completely in keeping extension of the story, drawing (perhaps too predictably) on other aspects of Dick’s work. The arrival at the autofac can’t help but recall Blade Runner (the one Dick film that all other adapatation apparently have to pay some homage to), but aspects of the question of Alice’s humanity also hark back to much of Dick’s work including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
The trick Beacham successfully pulls off is to extend Dick’s metaphor for rampant consumerism. The war having actually wiped out humankind, the autofac system found itself entirely without customers. Its solution was to simply create more, convincing human androids that don’t know they are artificial. Emily and company are all ‘fake’ people, with Emily modelled after the founder of the autofac system itself. The twist built upon this twist is that Emily has discovered this (via a recovered issue of Wired magazine), and her infiltration of the autofac system is to plan a software bomb deep in its matrix, thus destroying it from the inside.
This is a great extension of the story, taking Dick’s idea of the robots building more autofacs and converting it to the concept of the autofacs creating their own human-like customers. This allows Electric Dreams to once again explore Dick’s perennial question of ‘what is human?’ once again, but from a new angle. The performances are all great, and the environments exactly conjure up Dick’s story (although as with much SF TV there is a slight over-reliance on factory interiors for the depths of the autofac). Direction by one-time actor Peter Horton is serviceable rather than flashy, but the story stands by itself helped by the actors rather than anything else.
Verdict: Easily the best of the first eight instalments, Autofac stays true to Dick’s story, concerns, and themes, yet extends beyond the source material in a sympathetic and respectful way. The highlight of the series—if only more episodes were like this one…
Brian J. Robb
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