In 2005, David Hanson left Philip K. Dick’s head on a plane. Hanson, a roboticist, was en route to Google to present his team’s project— a painstakingly crafted android replication of the author, who died in 1982—when he changed planes and left behind a duffel bag. The robot’s head surfaced at a couple of airports around the American West before disappearing in Washington state, never to be found again.

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The bot looked remarkably like Dick and even wore some of his clothes, donated by his children. More importantly, it spoke not just like Dick, but as Dick, or at least it was meant to: The android’s creators loaded his prodigious body of work in the software, plus reams of interviews with the real writer. If a person posed the robot a question that the real Dick had been asked—and if it had been recorded—the machine would respond just as the writer did, in Dick’s own voice. Only if Dick had never answered a particular question would the software attempt to construct a response using a system called latent semantic analysis. The robot also had some preprogrammed responses to frequently asked questions.