The protagonist is Bob Arctor, member of a household of drug users, who is also living a parallel life as Agent Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to spy on Arctor's household. Arctor/Fred shields his identity from those in the drug subculture and from the police. (The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book.) While posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to "Substance D" (also referred to as "Slow Death", "Death" or "D"), a powerful psychoactive drug. A conflict is Arctor's love for Donna, a drug dealer, through whom he intends to identify high-level dealers of Substance D. Arctor's use of the drug causes the two hemispheres of his brain to function independently or "compete". Through a series of drug and psychological tests, Arctor's superiors at work discover that his addiction has made him incapable of performing his job as a narcotics agent. Donna takes Arctor to "New-Path", a rehabilitation clinic, just as Arctor begins to experience the symptoms of Substance D withdrawal. It is revealed that Donna has been a narcotics agent all along, working as part of a police operation to infiltrate New-Path and determine its funding source. Without his knowledge, Arctor has been selected to penetrate the organization.

Bounty hunter Rick Deckard signs on to a new police mission to earn enough money to buy a live animal to replace his electric sheep, in the hopes of achieving a greater sense of purpose in life for himself and his depressed wife, Iran. The mission, initiated by a now-hospitalized colleague, is to hunt down and eliminate (called "retiring") a group of six Nexus-6 androids that violently went rogue after their creation by the Rosen Association. Deckard travels by hovercar to the Rosen Association headquarters in Seattle, Washington to confirm the validity of a question-and-answer empathy test: his standard method for identifying any androids posing as humans. Deckard tests Rachael Rosen, the "niece" of the android-crafting Rosen family, who quickly fails the test. Rachael attempts to bribe Deckard into silence, but he verifies that she is indeed a Nexus-6 android and the Rosen Association was just trying to discredit the empathy test.

Dick’s heady sci-fi noir, the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner, is adapted into an experimental comic that includes the full actual text of the novel. Rick Deckard, a San Francisco P.I. or “blade runner,” is tasked with hunting down a group of highly advanced androids that have escaped their off-world colony and are on the loose. As he takes down each one, though aspects of his own identity come into question.

The novel is set in a dystopian version of 1988, following a Second Civil War which led to the collapse of the United States' democratic institutions. The National Guard ("nats") and US police force ("pols") reestablished social order through instituting a dictatorship, with a "Director" at the apex, and police marshals and generals as operational commanders in the field. Resistance to the regime is largely confined to university campuses, where radicalized former university students eke out a desperate existence in subterranean kibbutzim. Recreational drug use is widespread, and the age of consent has been lowered to twelve. Most commuting is undertaken by personal aircraft, allowing great distances to be covered in little time.

In this wry, paranoid vision of the future, overpopulation has turned cities into cramed industrial anthills. For those sick of this dystopian reality, one corporation, Trails of Hoffman, Inc., promises an alternative: Take a teleport to Whale's Mouth, a colonized planet billed as the supreme paradise. The only catch is that you can never comeback. When a neurotic man named Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that the promotional films of happy crowds cheering their newfound existence on Whale's Mouth are faked, he decides to pilot a scapeship on the eighteen-year journey there to see if anyone wants to return.

Garson Poole had a pretty great life: good job, nice apartment, a sexy, flirtatious assistant. And then he wakes up in a hospital room…the doctors inform him that he’s been in a car accident…and they can’t treat him. Because he’s a robot. Specifically, Garson is an Electric Ant, a human-like robot created and programmed to serve a specific function. But what is Garson’s function? How will his friends and co-workers treat him, knowing that he’s a machine, and not a person? And how much of his world is real, and how much of it is part of his programming?

David Mack and Pascal Alixe continue their charged and visually stunning adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Ant! When most people have crises of identity, a therapist might advise them to look inside themselves for answers. But after Garson Poole, CEO of Tri-Plan Industries, wakes up in a hospital and is told he is not human, but, in fact, a robot known as an Electric Ant, he goes looking for answers by opening up his chest panel and literally looks inside himself. But what lies in there is more profound and terrifying than anyone is prepared for…

As Garson’s world continues to unspool all around him, the threads fraying and his existence blurring around the edges, his questions are only answered with more questions. Continue down through the varying levels of reality with writer David Mack (KABUKI) and sumptuous art from breakout artist Pascal Alixe as they bring Philip K. Dick’s mind-bending story to life!

REALITY ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE… the adventure from legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick continues down into the yawning abyss of into the unknown. Garson’s world continues to unravel around him as he ponders the nature of his existence as an Electric Ant—an organic robot. But there are interests that want to prevent Garson from discovering the truth of his situation. And they are prepared to use deadly force.

Over the centuries, people have fought for the right to speak, pray, and to be free. Now, Garson Poole finds himself in a fierce battle to exist. From the mind of legendary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick comes the riveting climax of this landmark comic-book adaptation! From Kabuki scribe David Mack and breakout artist Pascal Alixe!

Though perhaps most famous as a novelist, Philip K. Dick wrote more than one hundred short stories over the course of his career, each as mind-bending and genre-defining as his longer works. Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams collects ten of the best. In “Autofac,” Dick shows us one of the earliest examples (and warnings) in science fiction of self-replicating machines. “Exhibit Piece” and “The Commuter” feature Dick exploring one of his favorite themes: the shifting nature of reality and whether it is even possible to perceive the world as it truly exists. And “The Hanging Stranger” provides a thrilling, dark political allegory as relevant today as it was when Dick wrote it at the height of the Cold War.

In these 15 stories about robots and androids, Philip K. Dick asks these questions. The answers differ with each story—in the fictional world and in the exploring mind of Dick the only certainty is change—but the author establishes some guidelines: “To be human, one must maintain his intellectual and spir­itual freedom at all costs. He must refuse obedience to any ideology; he must re­main unpredictable, unfettered by pat­terns and routines.”

John Anderton is the head of the Precrime Division. One day, he receives a report that he is going to murder a Leopold Kaplan, a man he never met. At first he goes on the run, but later turns to the offensive to figure out why the precogs identified him as a killer. He finds out that Kaplan is pushing to abolish the Division, claiming that it's not accurate. Giving himself up, he meets with Kaplan at a rally where he is used as an example of the ineffectiveness of Precrime and bolstering Kaplan's position. To everyone's surprise, Anderton pulls out a gun and kills Kaplan. He and his wife are exiled to an off planet concentration camp. On the way he explains his reasoning. After obtaining the precog reports he realized that one minority report said that he would not kill Kaplan. He realizes that each report is based on him having knowledge of the other reports. In the first report he kills Kaplan to prevent Precrime from being shut down. The second report has a narrative where, after reading the first report, he decides not to shoot the general and spare his family imprisonment. The final report details how Kaplan was planning a military coup to install martial law in place of Precrime thus leading Anderton to the decision that he has to assassinate Kaplan. Realizing that it's the lesser of two evils, Anderton decides to follow the path described to him in the third report and kills Kaplan.

Glen Runciter is dead. Or is everyone else? What is certain is that someone has been killed in an explosion organized by Runciter's competitors. In fact, your employees attend a funeral. But during the duel they begin to receive unpleasant and even morbid messages from their boss. And the world around them begins to unravel in a way that suggests they don't have much time left either.

Douglas Quail, a simple and ordinary clerk, wishes to visit Mars. Unable to afford it, he visits a company, REKAL (pronounced "recall") Incorporated, which promises to implant an "extra-factual memory" of a trip to Mars as a secret agent. The procedure involves administration of narkidrine, a sedative and truth drug, which causes Quail to remember and reveal that he actually did go to Mars as a secret government agent. His conscious memories of the trip have been erased, but his initial desire to sign up for the trip cannot be removed. The REKAL staff quickly get Quail out of their office without implanting anything, but his real memories are now returning slowly. At home, he finds physical evidence to support his trip but also remembers that he attended REKAL. This conflict causes him to angrily return for a refund, which he is given.