"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" is a novelette by Philip K. Dick first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April 1966. It features a classic meshing of reality, false memory and real memory. The title may be an allusion to the 1962 Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
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Douglas Quail, a simple and ordinary man, wishes to visit Mars. Unable to afford it, he visits a company, Rekal, Incorporated, that offers implanted memories ("extra-factual memory"). The attempt to implant some exciting Mars memories of Quail as a secret agent reveals that Quail actually is an undercover government assassin with a mind full of dangerous secrets. The Rekal staff quickly get Quail out of their office; he heads home and finds certain physical evidence to support his new old memories. His handlers initially seek his death but instead Quail, being an assassin, avoids this and goes on the run. Unfortunately, he has an implanted device which can be used to read his thoughts. He therefore makes a deal in which the memory of his Mars mission is replaced by a false memory of his deepest desire as analyzed by psychiatrists - that he saved the world from a Martian invasion at the age of 9. The Rekal staff begin the memory-implanting procedure, and run into the same problem as they did earlier - the incredible memories they are about to insert are already there and real.
The plot was loosely adapted into the 1990 film Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the film, the hero, renamed Quaid, actually travels to Mars, but the initial memory implant scene foreshadows much of what he achieves: kills the bad guys, gets the girl, saves the planet. A later encounter with a "Recall Doctor" (whom Quaid kills after seeing him sweat), who describes the procedure in cases where the memory implantation procedure fails, reveals that Quaid may have been lobotomized at the end of the film.
The script maintains deliberate ambiguity as to whether the events are occurring in the physical world or only in Quaid's own fantasy, which was an artistic decision by director Paul Verhoeven. In fact, in the 1997 re-release DVD, Verhoeven explains in the commentary that he chose to fade to white rather than black, as that technique is typically used in cinematography to indicate either death or awakening from a dream. A novelization of the film (ISBN 0-380-70874-4), written by Piers Anthony, was published the year before the film was released.
A remake of Total Recall is being filmed in Toronto, Canada for release in 2012.[1]
"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" was first published in the April 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It has since been republished in the following collections:
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