(The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book.)

Through a series of drug and psychological tests, Arctor's superiors at work discover that his addiction has made him incapable of performing his job as a narcotics agent.

As part of the rehab program, Arctor is renamed "Bruce" and forced to participate in cruel group-dynamic games, intended to break the will of the patients.

The story ends with Bruce working at a New-Path farming commune, where he is experiencing a serious neurocognitive deficit, after withdrawing from Substance D. Although considered by his handlers to be nothing more than a walking shell of a man, "Bruce" manages to spot rows of blue flowers growing hidden among rows of corn and realizes that the blue flowers are Mors ontologica, the source of Substance D. The book ends with Bruce hiding a flower in his shoe to give to his "friends"—undercover police agents posing as recovering addicts at the Santa Ana New-Path facility—on Thanksgiving.

"[1] Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife Nancy left him) and mid-1972, Dick lived semi-communally with a rotating group of mostly teenage drug users at his home in Marin County, described in a letter as being located at 707 Hacienda Way, Santa Venetia.

Dick's recovery program participation was portrayed in the posthumously released book The Dark Haired Girl (a collection of letters and journals from this period, most of a romantic nature).

It was at X-Kalay, while doing publicity for the facility, that he devised the notion of rehab centers being used to secretly harvest drugs (thus inspiring the book's New-Path clinics).

Mirroring the epilogue are the involuntary goodbyes that occur throughout the story—the constant turnover and burn-out of young people that lived with Dick during those years.

[6] This labor was soon supplanted by a new family and the completion of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (left unfinished in 1970), which was finally released in 1974 and received the prestigious John W. Campbell Award.

[7] Additional preoccupations were the mystical experiences of early 1974 that eventually served as a basis for VALIS and the Exegesis journal; a screenplay for an unproduced film adaptation of 1969's Ubik; occasional lectures; and the expedited completion of the deferred Roger Zelazny collaboration Deus Irae in 1975.

Tessa Dick, Philip's wife at the time, once stated that she often found her husband weeping as the sun rose after a night-long writing session.

[9] There was also the challenge of transmuting the events into "science fiction", as Dick felt that he could not sell a mainstream or literary novel after several previous failures.

Del Rey suggested the timeline change to 1994 and emphasized the more futuristic elements of the novel, such as the "scramble suit" employed by Fred (which, incidentally, emerged from one of the mystical experiences).