Ukase

Many estates peopled with crown peasants have been, according to an ukase of Peter the Great, ceded to particular individuals on condition of establishing manufactories […]

An Ukase, it appears, has been issued by the Emperor Alexander, to facilitate the introduction of calimancoes and other Norwich goods into his Empire.

Two years ago, the word went forth to friend and foe alike that gender applied to grammar while sex applied to people. I issued the ukase: “If you have a friend of the female sex, you are a red-blooded American boy; if you have a friend of the feminine gender, you have an unnatural attachment to a word.”

The planters, he explained in a letter to Lincoln, would accept emancipation by ukase in preference to being compelled to enact it themselves in a new constitution.

I knew a stunned plunge of disappointment and a bitter anger. What right had he to issue such an arbitrary ukase?

It is a short step from discovering that the world we know is a fake or a cheat to discovering that human beings are themselves factitious: that we are robots, ‘simulacra’ (the title of one of Dick’s novels), ‘just reflex machines’, ‘repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over’ in accordance with biological or economic ukases.