Half-Life Technology

In Dick's 1969 novel Ubik, 'half-life' technology preserves the consciousness of the recently dead in a state of suspended animation at mortuaries where the living can visit and converse with them. The dead exist in a kind of informational twilight — not alive but not entirely gone, their consciousness degrading slowly as the power sustaining them depletes. The technology is never explained mechanically; what matters is its metaphysical implication: that consciousness can be separated from the biological body and maintained, temporarily, in an artificial substrate that is vulnerable to decay. The half-life state is not stable. It requires continuous energy input. It degrades predictably. And most crucially for Dick's purposes, the degraded consciousness experiences reality itself as entropic — objects regress to earlier forms, time seems to move backward, the present dissolves into an increasingly distant past.