“Safe and Sound” is episode nine of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams and is based on the short story “Foster, You’re Dead!”
A car pulling a trailer drives though an underpass past a sign saying Safety First. It approaches a big city but is stopped on the way in by armed men at a roadblock at the border. In the car are a women and her teenage daughter. The mother gets out of the car and annoys the people manning the roadblock enough to get herself arrested. They have a yearlong pass to the city and it’s valid, so the cuffs are removed. The city is advanced, more advanced than where they come from by the sounds of it, a bubble that seems without the same degree of technology. The daughter, Foster, seems rather more impressed with the city than her mother, Irene, does. Irene, an elected representative from their bubble, wants to beat the system; Foster seems more interested in joining it.
Foster sets an alarm off going into school because she lacks a certain bracelet – a dex – and is sent into a line where she is manually scanned by security guards. Foster is given a red armband to wear. The dex Foster lacks is a monitoring device, that records what the wearer does. The cities are obsessed with being safe and consider constant surveillance to be how to achieve this. A map of the United States in Foster’s class when she shows where she has come from appears to show that most of the continent is desert. At least some of Foster’s classmates think that everyone from bubbles are terrorists who want to kill everyone in the city. Those in the bubbles believe this is propaganda; those in the city have what is essentially the same belief, but the other way around.
Foster wants a dex so she fits in and they are needed for the lessons too. Irene refuses to buy one, and states there have been no terrorist attacks in the past 20 years. Despite what the government claims. So Foster gets a classmate, Kaveh, to help her get one, using her mother’s credit. When Foster asks Kaveh about terrorist attacks, he says that he’s seen them all the time. On the newsfeeds. Irene believes that the cities need a bogeyman to justify their behaviour.
The dex Foster gets is supposedly an advanced model that allows the man on tech support to talk to her without anyone hearing. The man, Ethan, instils a high degree of paranoia in Foster, suggesting that everyone is behaving in a very dangerous way and cannot be trusted, because they might be terrorists.
Foster’s father heard voices, so she starts getting concerned. There is an insinuation that Foster is being used as a terrorist by her people. But is that really the case, or is she actually being used by the safe zones as a justification for their actions? Fear, paranoia and manipulation get out of control, so just what is going on? Who is telling the truth? The truth is not revealed until the very end.