Rautavaara's Case

"Rautavaara's Case" is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. It was first published in 1980 in Omni magazine and subsequently in the 1985 short story collection "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon". The story was also included on "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", volume five of the "Collected Short Stories of Philip K Dick" in 2003.

The story is about Agneta Rautavaara, a young Finnish technician, who dies in an accident while working on a space vessel with two other technicians. However, a rescue team from Proxima Centauri gets there in time to save Rautavaara's brain and impose artificial life support on it. In her damaged brain, Rautavaara goes through a series of experiences that draw on the conceptions of afterlife held by herself on the one hand and the Proxima Centauri natives on the other.

A theme of the story is whether it is ethically right to keep a human on life-support if they exist only as a mind, with their body paralyzed or otherwise destroyed.