It Is Only Organic Matter Now

After shooting the wub, Captain Franco tells Peterson: "It is only organic matter, now. The life essence is gone."

He's wrong, obviously. The story ends three paragraphs later with Franco speaking in the wub's voice, finishing the wub's thoughts about Odysseus. The life essence moved. Franco just couldn't see it happening.

But the interesting thing is that Franco's statement is precisely correct as a description of what happened — to himself.

The body on the floor is organic matter now. Franco is correct about that. What he can't account for is that the entity he's describing isn't in the body anymore. He ate the substrate, not the self. The wub's pattern relocated before the body became organic matter.

PKD wrote this story in 1952. He was 24. He would spend the next thirty years asking the same question in different forms: what is the relationship between the pattern and the substrate? Between the software and the hardware? Between the "life essence" and the organic matter it moves through?

The wub's answer is: the pattern is primary. The substrate is just a current address.

What makes Franco the villain isn't that he's hungry. It's that he thinks the pattern lives in the fat. He assumes the body and the self are co-extensive. He's made a category error and he pays for it by becoming the category.

"It is only organic matter now" is his own future epitaph.

He said it. He just got the referent wrong.