Adjustment Team by Philip K. Dick Episode #261

Philip K. Dick | August 18, 2024

Adjustment Team by Philip K. Dick Episode #261
Philip K. Dick

ADJUSTMENT TEAM

Episode #261 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller

Ed Fletcher is late to work, irritated and distracted, when the city around him abruptly fails. Buildings crumble at his touch. People dissolve into ash. Sound vanishes. For a few minutes, Ed walks through a version of reality stripped of weight, color, and permanence.

Then everything returns. The sun shines again. Traffic moves. His office stands intact. But Ed knows what he saw, and he can tell something is wrong. His coworkers are slightly altered. His boss is not quite the man he remembers. Objects have shifted, rearranged, replaced. The world works again, but it no longer matches the one he left that morning.

Ed learns that his simple lateness placed him inside an unfinished process. Teams he was never meant to see adjust people, buildings, and lives to guide larger outcomes. Their work is precise, quiet, and usually invisible. Ed is invisible too—until he isn’t. And once he notices the machinery behind the everyday world, there is no safe way to forget it.

The danger is no longer the system itself, but the fact that Ed has already shared what he knows with the one person he cannot afford to lose. To preserve his marriage and his sanity, he must decide whether to lie convincingly enough to survive—or tell the truth and invite forces that do not tolerate witnesses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) published “Adjustment Team” in Orbit Science Fiction in 1954, during a period when he was writing for magazines such as Galaxy, Fantastic Universe, and If. This story anticipates many of Dick’s later concerns: unseen authorities, manufactured normalcy, and individuals who glimpse the mechanics beneath reality.

Over the course of his career, Dick produced more than forty novels and over one hundred short stories, including Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. “Adjustment Team” stands as an early, sharply focused example of his obsession with systems that quietly decide what the world is allowed to be—and what happens when someone notices the edits.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to Adjustment Team by Philip K. Dick — a vintage science fiction tale where one mistake reveals the hidden system controlling reality itself.

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Each episode features carefully selected stories from the Golden Age of science fiction, professionally narrated. Timeless storytelling the way it was meant to be heard.

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