The Stack

Christ on the crapper, he thought. Africa. For the ghosts of dead tribes. Wiped out to make a land of — what? Who knew? Maybe even the master architects in Berlin did not know. Bunch of automatons, building and toiling away. Building? Grinding down. Ogres out of a paleontology exhibit, at their task of making a cup from an enemy’s skull, the whole family industriously scooping out the contents — the raw brains — first, to eat. Then useful utensils of men’s leg bones. Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did not like, but eating them out of their own skull. The first technicians! Prehistoric man in a sterile white lab coat in some Berlin university lab, experimenting with uses to which other people’s skull, skin, ears, fat could be put to. Ja, Herr Doktor. A new use for the big toe; see, one can adapt the joint for a quick-acting cigarette lighter mechanism. Now, if only Herr Krupp can produce it in quantity…

— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle