You are the reincarnation of a very important Gas Princess of Jupiter.
You don’t remember this, of course, because THEY have wiped your memory.
But don’t worry, princess. I, your faithful retainer, have found you after years of patient searching, and the rescue ship will be arriving in forty-eight minutes to return you to Imperial Jupiter. We will restore your memory en route…
So begins the Philip K. Dick novel that neither he nor I will ever write, Gas Princess of Jupiter.
Dick was obsessed with the difference between the noumenal (things as they are) and the phenomenal (things as we perceive them to be) and, thus, became the O. Henry of epistemological stunts. Continue reading
