A Scanner Darkly

Barris and Arctor try to repair Arctor’s car, but Barris and Luckman argue. Freck finds the atmosphere too tense and decides to leave. As he drives, he thinks about musical artists of the recent generation—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Croce—and wonders if their deaths presage the dawning of a darker era.

Sitting in Arctor’s living room, Luckman tells a story about Donna stealing 18,000 stamps from a malfunctioning postal machine and then reselling them for a profit. The story makes Arctor wonder if Donna has a deceptive and “freaky” side. When he asks to borrow Barris’s car to “score some beans” (106), Barris tells him his car is too modified for Arctor to handle. As a law enforcement officer, however, Arctor’s car has some modifications of its own: a device that can tell him if another police vehicle is near; a police scanner that sounds to the untrained ear like radio static; a transmitter built into his radio that covertly broadcasts all conversation within the car to the authorities. While relatively sophisticated, these modifications are not beyond the skill of “millions of car freaks” (108) who could similarly modify their own vehicles, giving them a decided advantage over the police.