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

A strange delay sends an ordinary office worker into a world where reality suddenly dissolves into dust, revealing a hidden force manipulating everyday life. Now he must decide whether to accept the truth—or survive the consequences of knowing too much.

What if you were just trying to get to work on time… and instead discovered that reality itself was being rewritten behind your back? In Adjustment Team, Philip K. Dick takes the most ordinary thing in the world—a man running late for his job—and turns it into a doorway into one of the strangest, most unsettling sci-fi ideas ever written: that the world we live in isn’t natural, accidental, or stable, but managed. Adjusted. Corrected. Rewritten on a schedule. And if you accidentally see the process happening, you become a problem that must be handled.

Ed Fletcher is not a spy, a scientist, or a chosen one. He’s just a regular office worker who oversleeps, drinks coffee, shaves, and gets on the bus. His only mistake is being in the wrong place at exactly the wrong moment—late enough to miss the scheduled “adjustment” and early enough to see the world dissolve into gray dust, its people reduced to lifeless shapes while white-robed technicians reset the universe around him. One clerical error—literally caused by a dog who fell asleep on the job—turns Ed into a witness to the machinery behind everyday life. And witnesses are not supposed to exist.

The story unfolds with Dick’s uncanny blend of paranoia, humor, philosophical dread, and bureaucratic absurdity. The cosmic and the mundane sit inches apart: godlike powers take the form of irritated middle management, the tools of reality adjustment look like office equipment, and fate turns out to be managed not by angels or aliens, but by frustrated workers with clipboards and deadlines. There’s no spaceship, no robot, no laser pistol—yet the stakes are far bigger than a typical action story. Adjustment Team asks a question far more disturbing: If reality can be edited, what does it mean to trust anything at all?

This is the story that later inspired the 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau, but the original version is darker, stranger, and far more philosophical. The movie turned the idea into a romantic thriller; Philip K. Dick wrote it as an existential trap—because once you’ve seen how the world really works, you can never unsee it. And you can never be allowed to talk about it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) is one of the most influential voices in science fiction, a writer whose stories didn’t just imagine the future—they questioned the very nature of reality, identity, and consciousness. His work is the foundation behind films like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly. During his lifetime, Dick was considered eccentric, even paranoid, but decades later the world finally caught up to him. Today he is viewed as a visionary whose fiction anticipated surveillance culture, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, alternate timelines, and the feeling that “reality” might not be what it seems.

He was nominated for five Nebula Awards, won the Hugo for The Man in the High Castle, and is now studied in literature courses, psychology departments, and philosophy seminars around the world. Yet at his core, Philip K. Dick was always writing about people caught in systems too big to understand—ordinary lives colliding with forces that rewrite the rules without warning. That theme began early in his career, and Adjustment Team is one of the clearest and most chilling examples.

If you enjoy vintage science fiction that bends your mind, challenges your assumptions, and makes you question the world long after the story ends… this one belongs on your shelf, in your headphones, and in your brain.

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.