Video screens were mounted everywhere, each playing its commercial. It was like the multiple windows of their home screen, except that here it was unremittingly hard-sell. This was a captive market, and the sponsors were merciless. He tried to tune out the nearest screen, but the alternative was to listen to the labored breathing of those packed in around him, and smell their body odors. On the screen a cabbie turned, as if looking at a passenger in the backseat. Beneath the old-fashioned checkered cap was the face of a mannequin. Smiling mechanically, it said: “Thank you for taking JohnnyCab! I hope you enjoyed the ride.” The commercial faded and another began. His eyes moved there of their own accord.
A happy fellow lay on a round bed, next to a sexpot. He had evidently just made love with her, or was about to. They were under a glass dome at the bottom of the ocean; colorful fish swam around outside. Quaid knew that most of the pretty fish were up near the surface, not three miles down, and that they had better things to do than pose for the eyes of tourists who paid them no attention anyway. Not when there were sexpots to be stroked! But, hell, it was their commercial. It was foolish even to expect realism in a commercial.
“Do you dream of a vacation at the bottom of the ocean…” the narrator said, in that deafeningly loud voice that advertisers insisted on inflicting on their victims. Quaid winced and tried to nudge away from the screen, but the other passengers refused to give way. They didn’t want to be deafened either.
The screen jump-cut to a poverty-level apartment, much worse than Quaid’s own conapt, where the fellow of the underwater dome sat alone, surrounded by a towering pile of bills. He looked woebegone.
“…but you can’t float the bill?” the narrator continued from offscreen.
He was scoring there! If Quaid just had the money to move to Mars! That was the real reason Lori opposed it; she knew there was no way they could afford it. Oh, there was the bonus for new colonists, but he knew that was quickly dissipated in moving expenses. There had to be a sufficient cushion, so that a man didn’t have to be a miner to survive there. So she made the best of their real-life situation, and he had to admit she did a good job of it, and that he should be grateful. But he was like the poor schnook in the commerciaclass="underline" he longed for a distant planet, instead of the crowded mundane life he could afford. Except that the guy in the commercial couldn’t even afford a decent conapt.
The scene jumped again. This time a sophisticated woman was skiing to a stop next to a flock of penguins. She was attractive in her snow outfit, and seemed to be on top of the world—or the bottom of it, as the case might be.
“Would you like to ski Antarctica…” Then the same woman was in an office, surrounded by ten employees, all of them demanding decisions. She looked properly harried. Her hair was mussed, and she no longer looked attractive, just tired. Quaid had seen executive women just like that.
“…but you’re snowed under with work?” Despite himself, Quaid was responding to these ads. Antarctica was a long way away, a forbidding, desolate region, similar in its fashion to Mars…
“Have you always wanted to climb the mountains of Mars…”
Quaid jumped. His attention was abruptly riveted to the screen. There, a sportsman was climbing a rugged pyramid-shaped mountain that looked startlingly like the one in Quaid’s dream. Was he imagining this? Was his dream taking over the mundane world, or his perception of it? No, this really was the commercial! It was not himself, Douglas Quaid, in the scene, but a smaller man in a tourist-type space suit, the kind that was made more for comfort than efficiency.
Then the sportsman became an old man creeping up a staircase.
“…but now you’re over the hill?” The camera pulled back to reveal the tweed jacket and dignified face of a professorial gentleman, the commercial’s narrator.
“Then come to Rekall, Incorporated,” he continued, “where you can buy the memory of your ideal vacation cheaper, safer, and better than the real thing.” The scene changed to a beach at sunset. The narrator sat comfortably in an odd-looking chair which floated over the water. “So don’t let life pass you by. Call Rekalclass="underline" for the memory of a lifetime.” Quaid watched, fascinated, as the Rekall jingle played and a twelve-digit phone number filled the screen.
Quaid was intrigued. He was held in thrall by a foolish dream. That was what this outfit seemed to be selling: a dream, in the form of a memory. Would that be good enough? He knew he needed some way to resign himself to his ordinary life. Maybe this was it.
The commercials blared on, exploring intimate toiletries, supposedly excellent investments, nostril suppositories to denature the pollution, and other products, but Quaid didn’t notice. Maybe he had found a way to visit Mars after all!
In due course he arrived at his job. He wasn’t late, quite, and soon he was onsite, doing what he did best. When the demolition execs wanted something broken up fast and well, he was the first man assigned. He never slacked off; he used the work as exercise, building his muscles unceasingly. After all, Lori was turned on by muscle, and maybe the dream woman of Mars was too.
He tried to distract himself from that last thought, focusing his attention on the job at hand. They were in the midst of clearing away one of the old auto factories that littered the landscape. Pollution levels had finally become life-threatening some fifty years ago, as everyone had predicted they would, but it wasn’t until people started dropping like flies that anyone had done anything about it.
Fossil fuel-burning vehicles were no longer “regulated” or “reconditioned”—they had been banned outright, and clean fusion technology, which had been available for years, was finally put to a practical use. The car manufacturers had fought the changeover tooth and nail, but they had finally yielded to public pressure and designed emission-free cars. It was a drop in the bucket, too little almost too late, as far as eliminating pollution went, but it was a start.
The car manufacturers had abandoned their old, outmoded factories in favor of streamlined, wholly mechanized plants in which robots were run by computers. But the detritus of the past remained and it was Quaid’s job to get rid of it. This morning he was working on the entrance road leading to the site of the derelict factory. He was hardly conscious of the passage of time as he reduced the roadway to quality rubble.
The thing about working hard was that it took his mind off foolish dreams; he focused exclusively on the job to be accomplished, as if it were the center screen of a truly fascinating video, tuning out all else. There was a certain joy to the breaking up of surfacing; it was as if he were pounding away at the strictures of society that kept him here on dull Earth instead of on some more interesting planet. He was accomplishing something.
But now the dream returned, refusing to give up. He tried to ignore it, but it hovered by him. Rekall—was there anything to it?
“Hey, Harry!” he shouted above the roar of the hammer. Harry was a middle-aged jack-jock, with a beer belly and a Brooklyn accent. They’d worked together for a couple of years and Quaid had found him to be a likeable, stand-up kind of guy. “You ever heard of Rekall?”
“Rekall?” Harry shouted back. Bits of rock fell from his hair as he shook his head. He didn’t place the reference.
“They sell fake memories!” Quaid prompted.
Now Harry remembered. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and bellowed the company’s jingle at the top of his lungs. Then he stopped his machine and asked, “You thinkin’ of goin’ there?” Quaid took a break, too, leaning on his jackhammer while it hissed in neutral.