Douglas Quail is an ordinary man, or so he believes, living with an ordinary wife and performing
an ordinary job. He is troubled by a persistent
dream in which he visits the colony on the planet
Mars, an irritation that manifests itself during his
waking hours by an urge to actually go there. Since
this would be expensive and impractical, he finally
decides to resort to the next best thing.
Rekal, Inc., is a company that implants false
memories so detailed that they are indistinguishable from reality. For a suitable fee, they agree to
provide him with the complete recollection of a
two-week visit to Mars, during which he served as
a secret agent for a security organization. They
begin the process after placing him under hypnosis,
and discover to their consternation that his memories have already been altered, that the story they
intended to insert into his memories is already
there in a slightly different form. Quail did go to
Mars as a special agent—as an assassin in fact—
and those memories have been professionally suppressed. Concerned that they will attract the
unwelcome attention of the authorities, the technicians abort the process and refund Quail’s
money. Unfortunately for all concerned, it is too
late, because the buried memories will inevitably
surface now. Quail is apprehended by his former
employer, who reluctantly plans to kill him, but
Quail suggests an alternative, a different composition of memories in which he helped alien visitors
as a child, who in gratitude delayed their conquest
of the Earth. The story ends with the revelation
that this false memory is also a real one.
Dick’s story became the inspiration for the
movie Total Recall (1990), which is quite faithful to
the source in the opening minutes, but which drops
the story of the aliens in favor of a protracted and
illogical series of captures and escapes as Quail
does in fact return to Mars.