Total Recall

CHAPTER 4 Work

Quaid found himself in the commuter stream he had seen from his window. He hated this, without being certain why; there was nothing inherently wrong about the densely populated foot runnels. Maybe it was just that his dream of Mars lent him an appreciation for the deserted open terrain, where even one other person in sight was significant, especially if it was a lovely woman in a space suit. Here he was constantly jostled by the thronging mass of humanity, breathing the used air of those around him and smelling the industrial pollution that was chronic at these lower levels, no matter what the local publicity ads claimed. Mars, at least, was clean; there was nothing there but red dust and jumbled stones. On Mars, a man could stretch out his arms without banging the snotty nose of the man next to him.

He descended the long escalator which at this hour resembled a rushing waterfall of heads, backs, and shoulders sliding toward the lower levels of the subway station. At the bottom, the stream was diverted momentarily around a small area occupied by a crippled fiddler. Quaid smiled, refreshed by the sight of someone claiming space and attention for himself in the midst of the anonymous morning crush. He paused to slide his ID card into the fiddler’s portable credit register. It recorded his donation and he allowed himself to be swept back into the stream again.

He squeezed into a security area. The mass of working folk formed into lines to pass the large X-ray panels. This was a bottleneck, costing him time, but couldn’t be helped. There had been so much violence on the mass transit system that measures had had to be taken, and certainly he didn’t want to be robbed or killed by some hophead freak on the subway, or be part of a group taken hostage by a nascent revolutionary cult. No metal or weapons-caliber plastics were allowed, unless they were plainly not weapons, and that did reduce incidents of violence somewhat.

Having nothing better to do, he watched the line ahead of him as it turned to pass the panels. Each person lost clothing and flesh to become a walking skeleton, then returned to full human form beyond the panel. He saw an attractive young woman approach, and watched closely as she paraded on the panel, but it was no good; all that showed was her bones, not her bare body. He always hoped that someday something would go wrong, the the X-rays would be diminished just enough to abolish the clothing, leaving the naked flesh. Unfortunately, it never happened; the panels either worked or they didn’t, full on or full off. Still, those were nice bones.

His turn came. He passed through, feeling like a stripper on stage. As he passed beyond the panel he glanced back at the line behind him and saw a young woman staring at him, the tip of her tongue playing across her lips, her eyes fixed. She had been trying to see his naked flesh! That pleased him, in a minor way. He knew he had good bones too.

What did he care what some strange woman thought? He had a lovely and attentive wife at home, and a lovely and adventurous dream woman on Mars. He didn’t need any other affairs. Yet, foolishly, he craved them. At least he craved some way out of this dull existence. Maybe it was adventure he wanted, whether of far travel or of sexual conquest. Anything except this damned daily rat race!

He continued onto an escalator and rode it down to the subway. This was another bottleneck, because there were never quite enough cars to hold all the people crowding in. He was too far back to make the first train that came, and had to wait for the second, which was a good six minutes later. They were supposed to run at three-minute intervals, but they never did; probably some high official was skimming from the transit fund, leaving less money for train procurement and repair. So it was the passengers who paid for it, in extra three-minute delays, helplessly. If he hit one more bottleneck like this, he’d be late for work, and get his paycheck docked.

The train finally came. Quaid squeezed on, feeling like a sardine in a monstrous can. What a contrast to Mars!

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 commercial: 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 Rekall: 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.

“I don’t know,” he said, brushing the rock dust from his gloves. “Maybe.”

“Well don’t,” Harry said firmly.

The bluntness of the reply took Quaid by surprise. Harry obviously knew something about Rekall, Incorporated that the commercials didn’t mention. “Why not?” Quaid asked. If there was something fishy about the place, he wanted to know about it.

Harry leaned closer and lowered his voice. “A friend of mine tried one of their ‘special offers.’ Nearly got himself lobotomized.”

A chill went down Quaid’s back. “No shit…” Quaid breathed, raising a hand to his brow.

Harry clapped him on the shoulder and stood to his machine once more. “Don’t fuck with your brain, pal. It ain’t worth it.” His jackhammer roared to life, and Quaid revved his, too. He turned back to the work at hand while he mulled over Harry’s words. It was good advice, surely. Only a fool would ignore it.

But when he got off work, he went to a phone unit. He ran his finger down a long list of businesses and their office numbers, stopping at Rekall, Incorporated. He wasn’t sure yet that he was going to do it, but he was going to find out more. It might be foolish, but it might also be the only way to deal with his dream.