44 pages, reading from the Select Stories of Phillip K. Dick

This 1950s vintage story reads like the Sky Net future imagined in the Terminator movies so much that the reader wonders if it were the inspiration. Corporal Leone and Lieutenant Scott are hunkered down in a bunker in a post nuclear Normandy, watching a Russian trooper advance on their position. They debate as to whether or not to take him out, but it is not necessary, for the very shattered earth is crawling with burrowing bots with razor saws that emerge to slice, dice and dismember any human that is not tagged with a radiation bracelet. The bots saved the United Nations forces after a Soviet first strike.

The bots, known as ‘claws’, were designed to reproduce themselves, and are now generating their own designs. The Russians want to parley

So Major Hendricks decides to chance a walk out to the Russian lines.

Second Variety is a work of farsighted genius that reads like an LSD tripper’s perception of our current line of drones. Dick paints a gray on gray picture of a world that has lost its very soul, and is looking to lose the possibility of rediscovering it.