Philip K. Dick would eventually have written this as a darkly comedic novel. A rationalist death cult plans to unleash a mind-altering drug, meanwhile the prota

Philip K. Dick would eventually have written this as a darkly comedic novel. A rationalist death cult plans to unleash a mind-altering drug, meanwhile the protagonist discovers a possibly benevolent AI has just come online in a Berkeley campus basement, all set in an alternative California where Nixon is still president and we have mining colonies on Mars. (The drug disables the empathy center of your brain, but also reveals the true nature of Nixon, who turns out to be a simulacrum, as he was actually assassinated in 1963.)