We Can Build You
Philip K. Dick
 We Can Build You is set in the then-future year of 1982. It centers on Louis Rosen, a small businessman whose company produces spinets and electronic organs. Rosen's partner wants to begin production of simulacra, or androids, based on famous Civil War figures. The firm completes two prototypes, one of Edwin M. Stanton and one of Abraham Lincoln. Rosen then attempts to sell the robot patents to Sam K. Barrows, an influential businessman who is opening up lunar real estate for purchase and colonization. Unfortunately, while the Stanton simulacrum proves able to adapt to contemporary U.S. society, the Lincoln simulacrum proves unable to do so, possibly due to the fact that the original experienced schizophrenia. At the same time, Louis begins a relationship with Pris Frauenzimmer, the schizophrenic daughter of his business partner, who has designed both simulacra. This becomes an obsession and Louis himself begins to hallucinate about Pris. At the same time, Pris defects to Barrows but then loses faith in the benevolence of their partnership when his objectives are disclosed as more prosaic than hers, with his plans to use simulacra colonists to entice human settlement on the Moon and other human interplanetary colonies within the solar system. After Pris's destruction of a John Wilkes Booth prototype simulacrum, the Stanton/Lincoln simulacra strand of the plot abruptly terminates. The remainder of the book deals with Louis Rosen's admission of schizophrenia and his Jungian therapeutic treatment at the Kasanin Centre in Kansas from where Pris was originally released. Under the influence of his therapist Rosen creates a virtual hallucinatory reality of his own where he resumes his relationship with Pris, marries her, has children and grows old together with her, finally culminating with him hitting her hallucinatory doppelgänger in a fit of pique. This concludes his final therapy session and he is released from the Kasanin clinic after his doctor accuses him of malingering. The end of the novel posits the query of whether he was actually batty to begin with. The real-world Pris, however, has become unwell again, and she is returned to Kasanin following her short-lived career as a simulacra designer.